Sister Sadie Immaculate
by AndThatWasEnough
Summary: Sadie Mathews knows a few things for certain: Her brother hasn't been the same since he returned from Vietnam, her best friend is not one to be underestimated, and high school sure ain't all it's cracked up to be. Oh – and she might hate God.
1. The Itch

**Author's Note: Welcome back, y'all! This is that sister fic I mentioned a while back – some of you probably already know Sadie Mathews, but even if you don't…this is her story. Not her brother's or Ponyboy's or anybody else's. So you don't need to have read any of my other stories for this one to make sense – it incorporates the universe in a standalone way. I hope you guys enjoy getting to know her. :D**

**Happy reading :)**

XXXXX

It's not stopped raining for a week. Noah – we may need you to build another ark.

I should be packing, but instead I'm drawn to the front window, leaning over the couch and staring at the street, waiting for my brother to pull up. He'd run out in a real hurry after he'd hung up the phone, saying there was some sort of emergency, and I could guess who it had to do with. We were all waiting for things to get better, for all of us, and my mother had decided she'd try to force them into getting better by moving us. Moving was sure a hassle; you never know how much stuff you actually have until you have to put it in boxes. Keith was helping me pack up my room when the phone rang, and I guessed he was over at Mr. Randle's right now. The only emergencies these days usually had to do with his son, one of my brother's best friends, Steve. He'd come back from Vietnam and had been alright for a while, but the way Keith had explained it to me, he'd just been hiding the hurt.

"Just cuz Steve didn't come back hurt don't mean he didn't come back hurt," was what he had said, and I knew he meant that maybe Steve hadn't been wounded, like he himself had been, but he'd been traumatized. How could he not be? The stuff they showed on TV and in the papers was bad enough. I couldn't imagine living it.

"Sadie. You can pack without your brother. I imagine you will get done faster without him, actually."

I turned my head and saw my mother coming out of the kitchen and putting another box of kitchenware on the table. If you could say one thing about my mother, it was that she was scarily efficient – but you can say a lot of things about my mother, and in my mind, all of them good. Or, nearly all of them. I figured my mother was just about the best mom on the whole entire planet, and there really wasn't any competition. She was even better than all the TV moms. Carol Brady who? I have to say, though, that I don't always love the nagging.

"I'm just taking a break," I said, probably sounding whiny. "What do you think is taking so long this time?" I asked more quietly, and I heard Mom sigh.

"I don't know. It will take as long as it takes. We just need to pray everything will be alright."

We did a lot of praying these days. Keith, I don't think he ever prayed, but he was coming to church with us more often now that he was back. Mom and I, though, we prayed about the war and we prayed about Steve and Sodapop and Keith, and I sometimes prayed that Richard Nixon would lose reelection because he seemed too angry to be president to me. I also sometimes prayed for The Beatles to get back together, but that seemed like an even bigger longshot. I've prayed nearly every night before bed for as long as I can remember, Mom usually right by my side, rosary in hand, and when Keith was in Vietnam, we'd sometimes pray for over an hour, asking God to please let him come home okay, and not in a coffin. I don't know what I'd do without my brother, and when we got the news about him getting hurt, I cried for hours, flinging myself on my bed and just wailing, and I was angry. I was angry at God, figuring it was His fault this had happened, and that He had killed my brother, that he was going to die.

My brother didn't die, which I was grateful for, of course, but he did come back just a little different. He hadn't been quite the same as he was, and he still wasn't, and he'd been back for roughly a year and a half now. I figured I'd feel different if I'd been shot in the jungle, too. How could he not be different? At least he wasn't doing drugs, like Steve was. I just wanted him to go back to being my brother, though, the way he was before, even if he was sort of annoying.

After watching for a little while longer, I gave up on Keith getting home any time soon and went back to my room to continue packing. We'd just started working on boxing up my books when the phone rang, so that's what I went back to. _Where the Red Fern Grows; Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Anne of Green Gables_…on and on. Another one of Keith's friends, Ponyboy Curtis, had given me a lot of his old books when he'd left for college, and he had a pretty big collection. Of course, I already had quite a few of my own, but my bookshelf was even fuller after he'd given them to me. Pony was nice like that – I got along with him pretty well, too. It was a benefit of having a brother that was a lot older than you that you got to know how to talk to older people. Maybe that's why I have only a few close friends my own age; I just like talking to older people better.

Finally, there was a knock on my door, and Keith was home. I smiled at him, and he smiled back. "Hey, girly-girl. Need a hand?"

"_Yes_," I said emphatically. "I got all the books put away, but there's still almost all my clothes. Mom said we obviously don't need to worry about the furniture until tomorrow."

"Obviously," he repeated, opening up my closet. I bit my lip, not wanting to avoid the elephant in the room for any longer than we already had, which had been maybe thirty seconds. I could be impatient like that.

"Keith?"

"Yeah."

"Is…is Steve okay?"

Keith took a deep breath, and nodded once. "Yeah, he'll be fine," he sighed. "He'll be fine."

I never got any real details. I knew about the drugs, but I didn't know what these emergencies looked like, the situations that made for these urgent calls, or how many of them were even directly drug-related. Keith hadn't even wanted to tell me in the first place about all of this, but if I work on him long enough on something, he usually gives in. I know it's not a good thing that I do that, but I _am_ fourteen now, and I don't care how much older he and his friends are than me – at some point, he's got to stop treating me like the little kid I used to be. I deserve to know what's going on.

Keith's always sort of quiet when he comes back from helping out, too. It's kind of nice this afternoon, with the rain pitter-pattering away on my bedroom window and the radio playing softly in the background, but it's also a bit of a red flag; my brother only gets like this when he's thoughtful, or sad, and instead of ever just _talking _about it, he just _thinks _about it, and then moves on like nothing ever happened. He's got to be one of the most frustrating people on the planet, I swear. He's always been this way, it's just that he's been like this more and more the past year and a half, and more and more since Steve got back and started getting bad.

"School starts up next week, don't it?"

I nodded. "Yep," I popped the '_p_.'

"Freshman year," he sang, and he caught my eye and we both grinned. "Whaddya make of that, kid?"

I thought about it for a moment. "I'm excited," I decided. "Weren't you?"

He made a face. My brother and school had an interesting relationship, to say the least. He hadn't wanted to go to college; he was good enough at baseball that he was playing minor league before he got drafted, but his insides got so torn up by that bullet and he got so sick over there that he just isn't healthy enough anymore, and by the time he is, it'll have been so long since he played that there's almost no point. Now Keith was aimless, as aimless as he was back in high school before he –

Well. He was a lot of things before. And now he's someone else.

"I don't quite remember," he mused. "It was ten years ago. Ain't that somethin'? When I was in the position you are now, you were _four_. That's kinda wild, ain't it?"

I laughed. "Guess so. But you had to be a little excited. Right? High school is supposed to be exciting and…different."

Keith looked at me funny when I said that, and then he set the dresses in his arms over the flap of a box and came to sit next to me on the floor, where I was sat by my bookshelf, and we both leaned up against the bed. "Sadie. Girly-girl. I want you to know somethin'."

"Okay," I shrugged, but I already knew what he was going to say.

"High school is real different," he agreed. "But…sometimes it takes a while for things to change. Some days, feels like you're stuck in the same damn rut you've been in yer whole life, and somethin' comes along and changes that. But that's life, kiddo. And you're gonna be one'a the best kids they got, and don't let anybody tell ya any different. Okay?"

"Okay," I mumbled. "Keith?"

"Yeah."

"Is it…d'you think I should have more friends than I do?"

Keith cocked an eyebrow – he was always doing that. It was one of the things that definitely _hadn't _changed about him. "No, not if you're happy with the ones ya got. Be with the people who make ya happy, kid. The people who like you for who you are. You do that, then you'll be alright. 'Sides, you're, like, the nicest kid I know. You'll be the most popular girl at Will Rogers in no time," he grinned, and bumped my shoulder.

"You were real popular in high school, weren't you?" I asked, and Keith rolled his eyes.

"Oh, I don't know," he grumbled. "Well-_known_, maybe."

"I've looked through all your yearbooks and you got _tons_ of signatures."

"Well, so do you."

"You're not getting me," I sighed. "I just…it's so _big_, and what if I just…disappear?"

Keith stared at me. "Sadie. Relax. It's just high school," he said easily. "You'll figure it out. And you'll be fine. Just like Steve. Everything's gonna work out a-okay for everybody."

I believed him. It was hard not to, when he smiled so easily and spoke in that gentle tone of voice. Everything about my brother was reassuring. He was one of the most important people in my life, and I had decided a long time ago that he was generally a good person to listen to, no matter how crazy he could get. Keith may be a total goof, but he understands things better than just about anybody. So when he talks – which is often – I listen.

xXx

Mom's had the itch to move out of this neighborhood for years. I can't blame her – we don't exactly live in the nice part of town. My whole life, Keith and I have been hearing her grumble about how we need to get out of here, but it's never really been able to happen until now. Keith's living on his own now, and he had sent his military pay our way, and a couple years ago, Mom revealed to me that she'd actually gone to secretary school before she got pregnant with my brother, and could type out eighty-something words a minute or more on a typewriter. It's just that when our father moved her down to Oklahoma, she hadn't been able to find any work, especially in her condition, and our father hadn't wanted her working anyways. But now, she'd found some secretarial work at the University of Tulsa, and she liked that a heck of a lot more than being a barmaid, and it paid better, too. I guess now just felt like the right time to her, and it's not like we were moving that far anyways. Ten minutes away to a neighborhood that was a bit more quiet, a house that was about as old but in better condition. Our house was fine, but the exterior was starting to go.

It helped that Keith had his own apartment now. It was really just me and Mom these days, and Keith was sort of a mess. So. You can do with that information what you'd like.

I was looking forward to moving; I was as ready for a change as Mom was, and none of my friends lived in this neighborhood, anyways. Keith seemed to be having a bit of a hard time wrapping his head around the idea, which I didn't get because he remembered the last time we moved when I was just a baby, and it didn't seem like it bothered him none – it wasn't like he missed the old place. I hadn't even seen our old house before, and I didn't care to. It was out on one of the old state roads, and no one had lived there since us. Keith said the place was in rough shape and probably dangerous, and that it wasn't a good idea for me to go poking around, so I didn't, and I didn't want to. Fine by me. I knew that house was the last place any of us saw my father, and I knew that Mom and Keith probably had memories associated with it that they didn't want to dig up, and even if I didn't have the memories, I had thoughts about my father and what he did to us, and I didn't want to think about them any more than I already did. That's probably why Keith never cared about moving out of that house – believe it or not, moving into this house was a step up for us at the time, and there were a lot of bad memories there, and a lot of good memories here.

I bet you that's what's got my brother so bent out of shape. This neighborhood is where he grew up with Steve Randle and the Curtis brothers, and a boy named Johnny Cade who died along with Dallas Winston about five years ago now. Hardly anybody talked about either of them anymore, not even Keith and his friends, but I still remember them. Dallas had hardly ever come around our house, probably because he knew how wary my mother was of him, but he crashed here a few times. I knew Johnny much better, and not just because of how often he spent the night here. He was nicer, if quieter, sadder. I invited him to see me in a church play once, but that was the same day he got badly beaten by some boys, and he didn't come. But he always watched cartoons with me in the morning, and anyone who does that is alright in my book – Keith was usually too hungover on Saturdays to bother.

"Ooh," Keith cooed. "I love this song." He leaned over and turned up the radio sitting on the windowsill, Bob Dylan's "Went to See the Gypsy" playing alongside the continuing rain. It had let up a little, though, and we had the kitchen window open to let in the late summer night air, damp from the rain, which had that wonderful rainy smell that I just loved. It was really only sprinkling now, the raindrops dancing on the ledge of the window. It wasn't that late yet, early evening, but with the clouds it looked dark.

This was our last night in this house.

It really struck me then that this was the last night I would ever spend in this house, in the room I had slept in for fourteen years. I would never bound up that exact staircase ever again, or listen to records in what used to be my brother's room, or make dinner or bake in this kitchen with my mother ever again. I focused real hard on drying dishes to keep from crying because even though I hadn't been sad about this before, it was really hitting me now.

"I remember freshman year," he went on, oblivious to me, "and I'd tagged along with Darry to this party and sat on the couch in some guy's basement making out with Kathy Lawson while 'Hey Paula' played on the stereo. Kathy loved that stupid song. I swear to God, Bob Dylan got me through high school. No joke! Music saves, I swear."

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, hoping to keep him talking so I didn't have to think.

"Sure does. It's everywhere – at parties, drivin' down the Strip, in diners, hangin' out with yer buddies…pretty sure I had the Top Forty memorized back then. And everything sounds good, too."

"Even Paul and Paula?" I smirked, and he flicked soap suds at me, and I giggled. "You sure are strange."

"So're you," he shot back. "Where d'ya think ya get it from? _Mom? _Naw, if you're screwy, it's cuz you spent too much time with me."

"I just mean that you gotta lot of weird ideas," I clarified as he passed me another pot to dry off. "Aren't you s'posed to be an adult now or something?"

"Aw, but I'm just a big kid at heart. What, you want me to just go around handin' out business cards and tellin' people to call me Keith? Cuz that ain't my name."

"Yes, it is. It's more your name than _Two-Bit _is."

"Don't think so. There's a lot in a name, and maybe nobody knows who _Keith _Mathews is, but they sure as shit know who _Two-Bit _Mathews is, and that's the way I like it, no matter how old I get."

My mother and I were the only people who called my brother by his real name. Everybody else on the planet called him Two-Bit, the name people had been calling him since he was…gosh, since he was maybe in the fifth grade. Maybe earlier, I don't quite remember. But he was right – that's the name people knew him by, and if you ask me, it said a lot about him. I guess people think my brother's supposed to be funny or something, but that's gotta be some sort of mistake because I'm pretty sure he's the only one who thinks anything he says is funny.

"Who started calling you that?" I asked.

"I swear you've asked this before."

"Well, I'm askin' again, and it ain't like you're doing anything else."

Keith sighed. "It was the fifth grade," he began tiredly. "There was this teacher – who I didn't even _have _– that was just out to get me, man. I mean, teachers gossip, so she must have heard about me from Mrs. Harris when they were smokin' in the teacher's lounge. The only times the lady ever saw me was in the halls and at recess, and maybe she just didn't like the look of me or somethin', cuz everything I did got on her nerves. Everything! If I even looked at her sideways she was on my ass. Well, this rightfully pissed me off, so I decide for myself that I'm gonna get back at her someday, somehow.

"So, one day, Mrs. Harris has to step out for a bit, and this witch comes over and takes over our class for her while she's gone and her class was at…I don't remember. But they weren't in class. And as I'm sure you remember, dear reader, in the fifth grade, you learn all about early American history – Indians, pilgrims, George Washington, that sort of shit – and so that's the lesson she was coverin'. So we pick up where we left off talking about Valley Forge, and the Teacher from Hell swears up and down that the soldiers were eatin' their horses, and damned if I know to this day if that's true, but I saw in this a comedic window. So I says – and I can confirm this because I've _experienced _it – that horse meat had to beat whatever rations they were gettin'. Well, this gets laughs, because fifth graders always think it's great when you talk without raisin' yer hand, guess cuz whatever you gotta say is so important that you gotta forego the whole formality, but, ya know, it was a pretty sharp response for an eleven-year-old, and I guess my classmates appreciated comedy.

"Well, the teacher didn't appreciate it so much, and with that one comment, I guess I pushed her over the edge – she was _fed. Up. _She's all huffy now, got her hands on her hips and she's all red-faced, and she glares at me" – he was picking up steam now, and even threw in a voice impression – "and she goes, 'Mr. Mathews. Best for you to find out now while you still have the chance to reform yourself, but the world does not revolve around _you_, and does not care to hear your two-bit's worth on every matter.' And then some kid – who was an even bigger smartass than me, believe it or not – yells, 'Yeah, _Two-Bit!_'" Keith shrugged. "And they all laughed, and it stuck. I thought it was kinda funny, so I went with it. They all started callin' me that, and that kid eventually moved away, so everyone forgot who came up with it, but they knew that's what everybody called me, so…yeah. Darry heard somebody call me that at one of our little league games, and then he started usin' it, and when we met Dally, he told him my name was Two-Bit. And now that's just my name, and I get a kick out of it, so why tell anybody otherwise? Cops, teachers, girls…they don't know who the hell Keith Mathews is, but Two-Bit Mathews?" He clicked his tongue and winked. "They know Two-Bit Mathews means _business_."

I stared at my brother for a minute, to the point that he was starting to look uncomfortable with how long I had been quiet, and then started shaking my head. "You're an idiot," I told him, and he just started laughing.

xXx

"I think I best be headin' out."

Mom looked out the front window at the street, shaking her head at the rain, which had picked up again, and it was full dark out now, too. "Be careful driving," she warned my brother.

"'Course."

Keith spared me a glance, and Mom looked over her shoulder at me, too, and then they started whispering to each other, and not even in English. Mom's from Italy, and Keith picked it up from her because that's what she mostly spoke when he was little. I know some, too, but not as much as he does, and this is what they do when they don't want me to know what they're talking about, but can't be bothered to leave the room. They were talking really quietly, and I didn't get everything, but I picked up a few things here and there, mostly that they were talking about a he and they were both worried. I'd bet you a hundred bucks it was about Steve, but I didn't say anything.

When they were done, Keith smiled at me. "See ya tomorrow, girly-girl."

"See ya."

"Big day!"

I nodded. "Big day," I repeated, and then he left, running out to the Impala and roaring away, probably not driving as carefully as Mom would have liked.

I sat back and tried to communicate nonverbally to my mother that I was trying to watch _Laugh-In _and didn't want her coming over to have any special talks with me right now, but mothers tend to ignore those kinds of signals, and she came and sat beside me on the couch. Mom didn't say anything at first, just watched the show with an unreadable expression on her face. I don't think she found _Laugh-In _all that funny. Keith did, but pretty soon he'd be more interested in Monday Night Football and I won't be able to watch, but that's only if he decides he needs to stop in on a Monday night, which I doubt he will. He's always doing something, and rarely with us.

I decided to beat Mom to the punch. "Mom?" She hummed in acknowledgement, looking over at me with a worried expression on her face, and I hadn't even given her anything to be worried about yet! "Do you think he's okay?"

"Who?"

Steve or Keith. Steve or – "Keith," I said quietly. Because my brother had said that Steve would be okay, so I had to believe him, even if I was pretty sure he was who he'd been talking about with Mom. "Do you think he's…okay?"

Mom sighed and chewed thoughtfully on her lip. "What is making you wonder?" She asked.

I thought about it. "I don't know," I shrugged. "He's just different. I feel like…he's been back long enough that he should be more like how he was. You know? Like…he's still _him_, but…he's quieter," I sneered. "Which I thought I'd like better than I do, but I don't."

Mom smiled a little. "A year and a half is no time at all for a young man to recover from war. I remember the boys back in Italy. I was young, too, but I remember the ones that had been sent home, wounded like your brother, many of them much worse than he was. They had seen things we cannot imagine, and so has your brother. Time is the only thing that will heal that. Distance. He could be much worse," she added gently. "He could be where his friend is. Be grateful that he isn't."

I was. I _was_. I was _beyond_ grateful that my brother wasn't shooting up heroin. That's not a sentence I could ever imagine I would ever think to myself, let alone ever say out loud, but it was the truth. "Okay," was all I whispered.

"You're tired. I can tell." She rubbed my shoulder. "Tomorrow is a big day. Your brother will be here early." I nodded. "Are you excited, though?"

I could tell by my mother's voice that she was, but instead of just saying yes, I started crying instead.

xXx

When I was done with my cry, Mom told me to go wash off my face and settle down, just calm down, and then go get ready for bed and lie down. I splashed some cold water on my face and scowled at my splotchy red face in the mirror, then sighed. I don't know what came over me, but I hoped it was over now, and decided to focus on getting ready for bed; brushed my teeth, combed the knots out of my hair, blew my nose, and by the time I was through with all that I was breathing a little easier. Sometimes we get overwhelmed, I guess. Everything just builds and builds inside you, and crying is the release valve.

I went into my bedroom and sat on my bed, looking around. Everything was in boxes, waiting to be loaded into a moving truck. It had never felt less like my room than it did right now, but I guess it wasn't really my room anymore – it was going to become someone else's room. Someone else's room was about to become my room, though, too, and they probably felt how I did, wondering who that next person was going to be. I hoped whoever got my old room didn't trash it.

"Better?" Mom asked softly as she sat down on the edge of my bed and I tucked my legs under the covers.

"Yeah," I whispered, shrugging. "I don't know. I think I'm excited – at least, that's what I've thought until now."

"Coming face to face with change is scary," she said, speaking in the absolute like it was nothing, like I probably should have known it already, and maybe I should have – my life has seen a lot of change in a short time. It's like when my brother is behind the wheel and he gets out on the old state roads and decides to open up; he hits the gas pedal and we're just cruising – wind whipping our hair, and he's laughing and hollering because he's an absolute nut, and then in a matter of seconds, he brings us back down, and the adrenaline that had the blood thrumming in your ears and your heart pumping is tapering off. The past few years have felt like those precious few seconds where he's going so fast I swear I can see time and space warp in front of my very eyes, and I'm still waiting to come down off it; I'm holding my breath waiting for everything to go back to the standard speed. "You have not had to think about it much until now."

"I guess," I sighed. "It'll be good, right? This will be better?"

Mom smiled and cupped my cheek with her hand. I leaned into her touch just a bit. "Of course. You do not trust me to do what's best for you?" She asked cheekily, and I laughed.

"I do."

"Good." She kissed my forehead. "Sleep."

That's just what I did.

xXx

I guess I should introduce myself or something here, but I think I've missed the part where I'm realistically supposed to do that. Besides – I figure you get to know people best when all you know is their name, and then you skip the backstory and just tag along for the ride.

XXXXX

**AN: So – let's see what sort of ride Sadie is in for, shall we?**

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Moving Up in the World

**Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who has followed, favorited, or reviewed this story so far. It means so much.**

**Happy reading :)**

XXXXX

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Keith swore. "How much crap do you have?"

I laughed from my corner of my new room, delighting in watching my brother haul the rest of my junk inside the house. I'd helped at first, but I'd somehow managed to trap myself in the corner, so it was all up to him now. Can't say I exactly minded – moving was a lot of work, and I had decided I considered this payback for all the atrocities he had committed towards me over the years: shoving my face under his arm, all the noogies, every time he'd pulled my hair, and that one time he was late picking me up from school by two hours because he, Sodapop, and Johnny Cade had hit a dog with his truck and had to take it to the vet. My mother had ended up paying for the dog's surgery, and she had really chewed him out for that one. That was right after Keith had gotten his license, though. Anyways, point is, I was trapped, he had nothing else to do, so I was fine with this.

"I dunno, how much crap do _you _have?" I shot back.

"Not nearly this much! Must be a girl thing," he said, peering over the top of the boxes. That was fair; seems all boys wore the same pair of pants and the same three shirts in a rotation. Girls, however, lived by a completely different standard, though Keith had certainly cared a lot about his hair when he was my age, but so had a lot of boys. Now he just wears it long, and I've got a bad feeling he's thinking about growing a beard. But that had to be better than the sideburns – right?

Not to mention that it seemed boys didn't care much for decorating. Mom had let me pick out new sheets and a new comforter for my bed, as well as some new prints for my walls. The last owner had probably been a girl, because the walls were painted a light lilac color, which I thought was just right. I'd also convinced her to let me get a beanbag chair, which my mother thought was ridiculous as a form of seating, but I thought they were cool. I wanted to have a bedroom that looked exactly like the ones in the magazines.

"I'm not helpin' you with any of this," Keith said, looking around the room with his hands on his hips. He waved a hand at some of the boxes. "Because, uh, this is…this is _your _space, and you don't want me screwin' it up."

"Bum!" I laughed, and Keith rolled his eyes. "Besides, it's not like I'd want your help arranging anyways. You ain't got no sense of _interior design_."

"Yeah, yeah, neither do you, girly. I'mma go help Ma with the kitchen. You work on diggin' yourself outta there, kid."

Good plan.

xXx

I hate being sweaty.

Do you ever notice how the most popular girls never get sweaty? Probably because they have boys to do everything for them, and the only boy I know is my dumbass brother. Now, I'm all for girls going out and doing things for themselves as much as the next woman, but when it's August in Oklahoma and you're surrounded by cardboard box after cardboard box full of junk, and not even the open window is helping with the stifling heat, and you can feel cool drops of perspiration rolling down your neck, you start to get a little bitter, I think. I'd only gotten through unpacking my clothes and getting all of them put away before I figured my best move was to just sprawl out face-down on the carpet.

Carpet!

I'd dreamed of this for so long. At the old house, it was all scuffed-up hardwood floors, but the bedrooms here had glorious, miraculously soft _carpet_. Poor Keith didn't have _that _at his place, so boo-hoo for him. Mine was a light grey to go with the lilac on the walls, with white trim. I know that _sounds _fancy, but it's not. It's certainly a step up, though, and laying there face-down on my brand new carpet in my brand new room, I realized my mother had been right all along: this _was _an improvement. I would still be going to the same school I was always going to have gone to, Will Rogers High School, and I could still get to the drugstore and the park. We had gone from _moving _to _have moved _up in the world, and with one move, it suddenly felt as if the sky was the limit. No, scratch that – there was no limit, absolutely none. The astronauts had proven you could go into space, and I bet you they could go further someday. And so can I.

Well, if I ever got unpacked and out of this room, that is.

xXx

"Sadie! Phone!"

I had been waiting on this phone call all day. What I had told Janie was, she should wait until after she had eaten supper to call because I was hoping I'd have gotten most of my stuff unpacked by then. That had been accomplished, but _boy_, had it been a task. Keith had been no help when I had asked him, instead snickering at me wordlessly as continued to, say, unpack the kitchen, or talk the movers' ears off in the front lawn. I had only been in charge of unpacking my room for the most part, but as my mother has said many times, I am very meticulous. See, if it had been my brother, he'd tackle it without a care, get everything in the general area of where it was supposed to be. His goal would just be to get everything out of boxes and off the floor. But that's how boys are. Girls care more about how things look, and I think I care more than most. Everything's got to be just so, so the room has the right feel. I ask myself questions like whether I should keep my barrettes in the drawer in the bathroom or the drawer in my new vanity. That was another thing – I had gotten a couple new pieces of furniture, that vanity included, which was a _dream_. I had wanted one of these for ages! It was a bright white with shiny gold knobs, and I was certain it was one of the nicest things I owned. But, it did mean that I had to reconsider how I wanted my room to be set up. I couldn't wait to show Janie my room – she would totally flip over it!

Janie Robinson is my best friend, no questions asked. If there's one thing that Keith has taught me that's actually worthwhile, it's that your friends – no matter how many of them you have – should be as important as your family. A part of it, really. Say what you want about my brother, but he's a good friend, and everybody knows that about him. I guess that's why he was so popular, even with people who hate him. Win him over, and he'll stick by your side. That's not exactly easy to do, but that's beside the point. I mean, look at him and Darry Curtis. They've been friends for something like nearly twenty years already. And then Darry's brothers and Steve Randle, he's been friends with them forever, too. They're a tight-knit group, always have been. Everybody knows that about them. I don't exactly have a group of my own. I've got other friends, sure. People who I can sit with at lunch, or talk to in class, a partner for a project. It's not that I don't have other friends. It's just that Janie is the one I'm closest with; like I said, she's my best friend. She's my Darry Curtis.

"Coming!" I yelled, and I sprinted down the stairs in my stocking feet, slipping just a bit on clean hardwood floors, and scampered into the kitchen, where my mother was holding out the phone for me to grab. She didn't even look at me, not a single glance my way; she was too busy flipping through a magazine. _Good Housekeeping_, by the looks of it.

"Hello?" I said into the phone, breathing hard. I would've launched right into the conversation, but I wanted to be sure it was Janie. I mean, I knew it was Janie. But you had to be sure.

"_Tell me everything_!"

Yeah, it was definitely Janie. "Janie, you're totally going to flip when you come over tomorrow. You should see it! It's _purple._ But not like some stupid sort of purple" – my mother looked up from her magazine and gave me a strange look, probably because she didn't understand what I meant by a stupid sort of people, but I just shrugged her off – "but a real mature sort of purple. Ya know what I mean?"

_"Yeah, like not super crazy-looking. Super bright, ya know?_" I knew. _"Is the closet any bigger?_"

"Yes!" I gushed dramatically, falling into a seat at the kitchen table. Mom was now watching me with a raised eyebrow and dry expression. "Oh my god" – Mom's eyebrow arched even higher – "…gosh, there's so much more space. You're really gonna have to see it to believe it, Janie."

Mom was kind of inconsistent about when she reprimanded us about supposedly using God's name in vain. And she wasn't the kind of woman who was gonna smack our knuckles with a ruler or make us kneel on grits while we said forty Hail Marys – but she did pull out that disapproving eyebrow raise. It must have been a genetic thing, the cocking of the eyebrow, because all three of us did it. I sometimes wonder if my father could do it, but I didn't care enough to ask. Would it be stupid to hope that he couldn't? Probably.

Janie started going on about something school-related, something about how she was dreading riding the bus – the same complaint she had every year, so I kinda tuned her out and watched out the window, and while she was talking, a car pulled into our driveway. At first I couldn't figure out who it was, but I heard my brother suddenly drop what he was doing in the living room and throw the front door open and yell,

"Well, well, _well! _Lookit what the tide brought in!"

His buddies were here.

I sighed into the telephone. "Janie, I gotta go – Keith's buddies just pulled up in their clown car." I wouldn't have been able to hear her if I tried. She understood.

"_I'll come over tomorrow to see your room, okay?"_

"See ya then," I said, then hung up.

I glanced over at my mother, who hadn't moved from her spot and was still intently focused on her magazine. She had gotten used to my brother and his friends' hijinks over the years, and could probably just tune them out. All of his friends were really nice to her, so that's probably why – I didn't get quite the same treatment anymore. They were still respectful, but when I was a kid, they didn't pick on me quite so much. Now I got all sorts of stupid questions about what boys I liked and stuff like that, and when I would glare at them they would giggle like a bunch of schoolgirls. You'd think by this point in their lives they might be a little more mature, but that definitely wasn't the case. Besides the boy stuff, they also thought it was funny to screw with me, tug on my hair, and I had to constantly remind myself that all of them were older than twenty. Can you believe that? It was all harmless, but there's something not right about being fourteen and the mature one.

Keith acts like every time he sees his friends is the first time he's seen them in years, and they sometimes return the favor. I should have guessed they would come over – none of them go through any major life change alone. They're all joined at the hip. Mom says what they have is something really special. I guess so – mostly they're just annoying.

"Sadie!"

When I heard my name, I went out into the living room and saw Sodapop Curtis leaning in the doorway. He grinned when he saw me. "Hey, kid. Long time no see."

"Hey," I parroted, and accidentally got close enough to allow for him to ruffle up my hair. I didn't even bother scolding him – it wouldn't make any difference. "What're y'all doin' here?" I asked.

"What else? We're here for a housewarmin' party!"

Of course they were. I peered around him and saw Soda's older brother Darry talking to Keith in the driveway, and I was surprised to see Steve with them, too, looking…normal. He didn't look like he had been struggling with anything lately, least of all drugs. He was even clean-shaven. I couldn't help but wonder if it was just a front, though, just temporary. I knew better than to ask, though, at least not until later, when it was just Keith and I and Steve wouldn't be around for my questions to make him upset.

"How you likin' the new digs?"

I shrugged at Soda's question. "I'm getting used to it. I really like my new room, though."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. It's purple!"

Soda laughed. It was a nice sound; growing up, the Curtis family had always been exceptionally nice to me, even if the boys did pester me quite a bit. I remember their mother especially, her and my mother sitting together in the stands at baseball games with me in the middle, or talking together before and after church. From what I could tell and remember of her, and what mom and Keith and her sons had told me, she liked having a little girl around to talk to sometimes, since she had been surrounded by testosterone. As for the rest of them, for as close as our brothers were, Darry had always been a bit of a mystery to me, being so much older, and Ponyboy had gotten paired off with me often, even though he was five-ish years older than me. Sodapop had always been the sweet, handsome one, though, but even though he was cute, it was hard to see him as much more than one of my brother's pesky friends. I'm sure he thought of me in a similar way – just Two-Bit's kid sister.

"Sounds nice, kid."

"I ain't a kid," I shot back, and Sodapop just shook his head, still grinning. "I guess Ponyboy is back at school?"

"Yup," he confirmed. "Your brother didn't tell you?" I shook my head, and Sodapop called out to my brother, "Hey! Dumbass! Sadie here says you didn't even bother to tell her Pony left?"

"What?" Keith called back, eyebrow cocked. "I didn't? Oh. Well, he left Sadie. Now ya know."

I rolled my eyes. Ponyboy went to school at the University of Chicago, so we probably wouldn't all see him again until Thanksgiving. Everybody was real proud of him – he got a full ride and everything for how smart he was and his running, and he ran on the track team there. Ponyboy was a real bigshot, but he never let it get to his head. I liked that about him. I wish I could have gotten to say goodbye before he left, though.

There was no telling what kind of housewarming party my brother and his friends were planning, but I already knew that my mother had probably already put down her magazine and started preparing her new kitchen for the onslaught of grown men that were about to come in any second now, asking for food, and she had told me that she hadn't planned on doing much for dinner tonight. Looks like we might be ordering a pizza, which had probably been their hope.

"Hey, Maria."

"Darrel," my mother greeted. Darry kissed her cheek, and she looked very touched by that. He was always sweet to her, which made me happy to see.

"Aw, great – Darry, why do you always gotta set the bar so high?" Soda wheedled.

Suddenly everyone was in our almost completely unpacked kitchen, talking over each other. With their conversations, it was as if they were simultaneously talking to each person individually, while also talking as one group. It was a dynamic that no one outside of them could understand, and my mother and I had honestly stopped trying a long time ago. Within the blink of an eye, they had commandeered the whole house – nothing new.

"Place is nice," Steve said, looking around a bit and sizing it up. "Looks like y'all got a lot done in just a day."

"Yeah, no thanks to him," I said, hooking a thumb at Keith. He just cocked an eyebrow.

"Pretty sure I was the one who did all the heavy liftin', girly-girl."

"I dunno, Two-Bit – I'm inclined to believe the kid," Darry said, and he was rewarded for that with a hard pop to the shoulder. Mom shook her head.

"Play nice, boys," she sighed, navigating around them to get to the cabinets to pull out glasses and plates. I wondered how many times over the years she's had to say that to them. "You boys hungry? I do not have anything on hand." Looks like Mom had been onto them, too. "Would one of you mind getting take-out?"

The four of them all cheered and filed out the door, out to get us God knows what to eat. In and out in a flash. They were a group of whirling dervishes, coming in like a good ol' Oklahoma twister and mixing things up faster than you could blink an eye. I silently raised an eyebrow at my mother, who just gave me a little smirk and shook her head slightly. For as wild and confusing as they were, it was nice to see them all together, especially after the world had tried so hard to split them apart.

xXx

That night, I was sitting in front of the set watching _Hawaii Five-O_, an open box of leftover pizza sitting in front of me on the coffee table, while Mom and Keith were upstairs getting the last few big pieces of furniture settled. When the guys were here, they'd helped Keith finish up getting everything back in the house while they talked at each other and stopped for pizza and beers as they went, but there were still a few things to arrange. My mother is extremely efficient, so she'd been instructing them as they went – telling them where everything was supposed to go and generally overseeing them. Now it was just down to the little stuff.

If I'm being perfectly honest, even though I felt a little bad that I wasn't helping them out anymore, I was pretty tired from the day and sorta just wanted to veg. Plus – and I know this is bad, but I would confess to it next time I was at church – I kinda wanted to eavesdrop on them a little. So, at a commercial break, I turned down the volume on the TV and crept over to the banister, straining to hear up the staircase what they might be saying. I used to know all the best places for eavesdropping at the old house – my closet, through a vent, on the back porch under a window – but this was the new place, so I was going to have to scout it out. I know this really isn't the best habit, but Mom and Keith hardly ever tell me anything, and besides – it's not like I've ever been caught. It's only bad if someone catches you; otherwise, this one's between me and God, and so far he's kept me secret, so long as I admit to it at confession and repent for it. The priest must be getting real tired of me saying the same thing, but I just keep on doing it!

I stood up on my toes and grabbed onto the banister, stretching myself as far as I could go without actually climbing up the stairs in an attempt to hear. It might just seem like I was being nosy, but I had my reasons for doing this – I always did. This time, it was all because every time my brother had gotten asked about the move today – by me, my mother, his friends – he had dodged the question.

_I don't know – how do you feel? I'm not the one who's gonna be living here._

It was true; he wasn't going to be living here with us, but he was going to have to come here at some points or others, and it's not like we wanted him to stay away from us just because Mom and I were in a different house. We all deserved to move up in the world, didn't we? And as far as I was concerned, this move didn't reflect progress only for Mom and me, but Keith, too. Some days, though, I'm pretty sure Keith was just happy he was alive, and that was progress enough for him.

"…won't be nothin'. I'll ask Steve about it, he'll take a look." That wasn't anything interesting – just about Mom's car. Keith must have been standing near the staircase because I could hear him loud and clear, but Mom's response was muffled, as was whatever else she was saying. But after a fairly long pause, he said, "Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. It's fine, he's fine. 'S all good." I guessed she had asked about Steve being alright to do any work on the car, but he had seemed weirdly fine to me when he was over today, so I guess if he's okay…then he's okay. At least for now.

There was a creaking, and that was my signal to move along, without any more information than I'd had before. Bummer.

xXx

The next afternoon, with my bedroom completely unpacked and arranged almost the way I liked it, there was a knock at our front door, and I knew immediately it was Janie, even before my mother called me to come get the door. I raced downstairs, Mom telling me to slow down as I flew past her, but it was pretty half-hearted because she was too busy rearranging furniture in the living room. When I threw open the door and saw it was Janie on the other side, I grinned.

"Hey," I greeted.

"Hey," Janie parroted, and waltz right past me into the house.

Janie has been my best friend since the first grade. I couldn't exactly tell you why – on paper, we were very different people – but we've been friends so long, we can't imagine _not _being friends. When you're in first grade, you become friends for all sorts of superficial reasons; for us it was because I told her I liked her hair ribbons, and she thought I was the least obnoxious person in the class. And that was that. Janie made me confident; she was outgoing, funny, and a bit scheming. She had dark brown hair and skin, and the best fashion sense in Tulsa, as far as I was concerned. She actually made a lot of her clothes, which I did sometimes, too, but I also went to thrift stores more often than not. So, of course, she was the perfect person to have help me pick out what exactly to wear for our first day of high school on Monday.

"Hi, Mrs. Mathews," she greeted my mother. "Place looks nice."

Mom smiled at her. She loved Janie. Since we had been going to each other's houses for years and years now, we really knew each other's families well. "Thank you, honey. Are you ready for school to start?"

Janie shrugged, clearly not very enthusiastic. She still made good grades and all, but I liked school more than she did these days. School was just too small a box for Janie to be contained in, and I understood, but I liked school – maybe it was the routine. I don't know for sure what it was, but I just sorta…liked it. "It'll be alright," she said. "I guess."

"Mom, Janie and I have stuff to do, so…"

My mother waved us off – right, right – and I dragged Janie upstairs so I could show off my new room. I threw open the door and shot Janie a big grin and spread my arms to the sides – "Ta-da!" – and let her take it all in. Janie had a very discerning eye, and she looked around, slowly nodding her head in approval of the way I had set things up. "Didn't I say the purple was nice?"

"It is," she agreed. "It's not like a purple some little kid would paint her room." Janie flopped down on my bed and heaved a big sigh. "Best part is the air conditioning, though."

"Definitely," I agreed whole-heartedly, and flopped down opposite her in my beanbag chair. We didn't say anything for a minute, comfortably silent, and while we basked in the gloriousness that was our new air conditioner, I thought more about what was coming for the two of us on Monday. I'd already spent more time than I probably should have thinking about it – _over_thinking about it, probably – and I was getting myself all worked up. I'm pretty good at doing that. "You're really not excited about school Monday?" I asked, and Janie snorted softly.

"Why should I be? Junior high was full of dumbasses – high school ain't gonna be any different."

"What makes you think it wouldn't be?"

Janie sat up and shot me a look. "You're not serious about that, are you?" I pursed my lips, already feeling like an idiot for asking that question. Maybe I was a bit more optimistic than Janie was about some things…but I didn't blame her. Trust me to shove my foot right into my mouth like that. "That school is ass-backwards. I'm gonna be one of the only black girls there, and…" she sighed. "I don't know. You know how that goes. _And! _They don't even have sports for girls. And we _still_ can only wear pants on Fridays. It's crap."

I tottered my head. "It is crap," I agreed. "But we don't even play any sports. And I like skirts, and so do you."

Janie shook her head. "That's not the point. It hasn't changed since our brothers were there, but they were able to wear pants and play sports, and all girls have been able to do is run for homecoming queen and take home-ec."

I raised an eyebrow. "Well. I don't think that's _all_ we can do."

She rolled her eyes. "You know what I mean." With another sigh, Janie decided to changed the subject. "What are you going to wear?"

I groaned as I rolled out of my beanbag chair and scampered over to my closet, starting to search. I hadn't quite decided yet, but Janie had an eye for these sort of things. A first impression was the most important thing, after all, and you only ever got one shot at it. Teachers always liked me because I was well-behaved and turned everything in on time and got good grades, but it was always everyone else that I worried about. Like I said, I'm not always exactly great with people my own age.

There was a yellow shift dress with pockets and a short peasant dress that could work. I held up both to Janie, and she considered them both for a moment. "The peasant dress," she finally decided. "How are you going to do your hair?"

Usually, I just pulled my hair back into a low ponytail or with a clip, but – new schoolyear, new me. "What if I flat-ironed it and did my part down the middle, and maybe tied a couple sections back. Like this?" I demonstrated for her, moving my part towards the middle and pulling a couple of thin sections from the front to the back. "Like this, but it's all straightened out."

That sounded good to me, and Janie seemed to agree. "I think we should match, too. I have a dress kinda like that at home that I can wear."

"Yes!" I said excitedly, and now some of my nerves were wearing off that there was something of a plan in place.

I sat down at my new vanity and looked in the mirror, examining my face. It was an alright face – Janie was prettier than I was, but she was always nice to not say so. Her mom let her experiment more with makeup, too, while _my _mother had more rules about it. I had plenty that I had bought by myself, but even though Mom never judged Janie, she would give me raised eyebrows and remarks about what I was wearing _not being appropriate for the occasion_. Lipstick especially seemed to be a sticking point for her, but if I snuck it out of the house I could put it on at school. I just thought makeup made me look…more put together. Like an actual human being, you know? Grown up. Otherwise, I still looked like a little girl at fourteen. Also, my nose was too wide.

I hated it.

"Sadie, I can hear you thinking."

I turned around and screwed my mouth to the side. "I'm just freaking myself out."

"You shouldn't," Janie said. "It's just high school."

If only I could be as confident as Janie was. If only all of us could be as confident as Janie! People like her and my brother couldn't care less about what other people thought, only I knew that in Janie's case that was something of an act. Words hurt her – she just liked to pretend they didn't. I wasn't afraid to show they hurt me. And it wasn't just high school, either. It was the next four years of our lives, and I had convinced myself that in order for those for years to go well, Monday needed to be perfect. "I just want it to be better than junior high," I whispered. _That _had been particularly awful. Janie softened up a bit.

"I know," she said. "I think it will be. _Any_thing would be better than junior high was. We just need to keep looking out for each other." She made it sound oh, so simple. We'd both been through the wringer the past few years. I just wanted things to be different. Maybe meeting people from other schools would help – new faces, people who don't know us and won't judge us.

It probably wasn't going to be that simple, though.

XXXXX

**AN: Thanks for reading!**


	3. Have a Great Day, Sweetie!

**Author's Note: Of course I started publishing this right before winter break and took a break from writing for a bit while I got into the new semester. What timing! Thanks for your patience.**

**Happy reading :)**

XXXXX

On the first day of high school, Will Rogers gave to me:

Twelve scattered quarters.

Eleven pipers piping. (Okay, they were flute players on their way from band practice, it's just a joke.)

Ten callout flyers.

Nine convocation speakers.

Eight dumbass seniors.

Seven brand new teachers.

Six lunchroom monitors.

Five minute passing periods.

Four advanced classes.

Three flights of stairs.

Two tardy passes.

And one pain in the ass brother.

xXx

"Sadie, let's go! You're gonna make me late."

"I'm coming!" I yelled, but truth be told, I knew I was running a bit behind. The first day of school had really come up and hit me like a truck this year. It's just that I wanted everything to be perfect, ya know? Maybe I was being a bit too meticulous with everything, but first impressions are everything. Besides, I was almost done anyways; I put in my earrings and stood back, scrutinizing myself in the mirror one last time, smoothing down my dress and making sure I didn't look all wrinkly.

"_Sadie!"_

"I'm _coming!_" I repeated, huffily grabbing my notebooks from my bed and rushing downstairs.

Mom was already at work, so Keith had oh-so-gallantly offered to drive me and Janie to school…if we didn't make him late to work, that is. Well – "work." My brother had formed a very peculiar habit when he got back from Vietnam where he'd go around offering to do odd jobs for people without ever actually getting a real job; well, at least not for any extended period of time. It was probably his natural charisma and good humor, but people seemed to be happy to let him do it, especially since it seemed most of the stuff he got stuck doing were all the mundane tasks nobody else wanted to do. I couldn't tell you why he did this, or how he managed to make it profitable, and there's a good chance I don't _want _to know how it's profitable (Keith hasn't always gone about making money in the most…ethical of ways, but I'm not so sure on the specifics), I just know that it is. I guess it makes him happy. That's good, right?

"'Bout time. What took you so long, anyways?" Keith asked, tugging on my hair as I passed by him to grab an apple from the fruit bowl. Mom had tried to make me eat breakfast, but I was so nervous all I could manage was half a bowl of oatmeal.

I rolled my eyes. "Sorry to inconvenience you – it's just that _some of us _like to clean up nice."

Keith looked down at his T-shirt and jeans, then back at me, eyebrow raised. "I dunno, I think I manage. You look nice," he decided to add, probably to get back on my good side. I decided to let it work.

"Thanks," I said loftily, but I wasn't quite ready to let him off the hook yet, so as we walked out to the car, I asked, "How do you expect to get a girlfriend dressing like that?"

"Who says I'm lookin' for one?"

I climbed into the backseat and then he pulled out of the driveway, headed towards Janie's house. My brother hadn't had a steady girlfriend in about two years. For most of high school, he'd dated a girl named Kathy Lawson, but they were always breaking up with each other, which was fine by me because I'd never really liked her, and neither had our mother. They hadn't been together for years, which was definitely for the best – Kathy was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, and she and her brother were probably two of the meanest people in town. Go figure.

The thing is, Mom – who's pretty cool in a lot of ways, but fairly traditional in others – was I think starting to wonder when Keith would stop literally screwing around and finally pick a girl and settle down. The way I saw it, though, he was only twenty-four, and twenty-four is pretty young. He should probably be more focused on finding steady work and not smoking pot than finding a steady girlfriend. But that doesn't mean I can't tease him about it.

Janie was waiting for us out front, sitting on the curb right outside her house with her books in her lap, and as the Impala pulled up I could clearly see how irritated at my brother for being a little late, but our being late was actually my own fault because I took forever getting ready. I'd go ahead and let her blame Keith. He kept the car running while he leaned across the seat and yelled out the window at her,

"Sorry 'bout the lateness, kid. Sadie just couldn't decide which pair of granny panties she wanted to wear."

"_Keith!" _I shrieked, and I reached over the back of the bench seat and hit him in the shoulder, but my fist just sorta glanced off him, and he swatted at me like a horse's tail to a fly. Janie just snickered as she slid into the backseat next to me and said 'hey.' "I do _not _wear…_those_."

He glanced at me in the rearview mirror as we pulled away from Janie's house and headed towards the school, and I could tell exactly what look he was giving me even through his sunglasses – the raised eyebrow always gives him away. "Whatever you say, pal. Janie," he suddenly pivoted, deftly changing the subject, "how're you? Ya feelin' today?"

"Sure," she shrugged. "School's school – you know how it is."

"Indeed I do," Keith drawled.

He really did; I imagine that staying a whole extra year at Will Rogers High School ensured he really knew that place well, but every time I tried to pump him for information, he sort of just hemmed and hawed and told me only vague things. Sure, he had graduated a while back now, but there was no way he had just up and forgotten everything. He'd say something like, _I think you and I are gonna have very different experiences_, or something stupid like that. Which, fair enough – the only things Keith ever got involved with at school were baseball and after-school detention. I planned to be a little more active; I figured it might be a good way to meet new friends. Janie was great, and we did have other friends, too, but I guess I just wanted to expand my social circle a bit. Nothing wrong with that.

"What're y'all takin', anyways?"

Janie pulled her schedule out of her notebook, and I pulled out mine. They had been sent to us in the mail the week before, and I started comparing mine to hers as she started to tell my brother what classes we were taking. "Biology, algebra, English, world history – "

"All advanced," I added, trying to make us sound more impressive.

"Sounds pretty typical," Keith mused.

"Home economics," Janie continued, and she gave me a wry smile. A staple for most girls. It wasn't a mandatory class for anybody, but the school might as well have come out and made it one for their female students – it was…expected. "Then Spanish and band."

"I've got all the same except French and choir." The only reason I chose choir was because I was also in the choir at church. I wasn't bad – not the best, but certainly not the worst. More practice couldn't hurt, I figured.

"Sadie, you already know another language. Why you gotta take another?"

Okay, I didn't _really _know another language, not in the way my mother and brother did. The story goes that my brother oscillated between Italian with our mother and English with our father, until my father put his foot down and said that no child of his was gonna be walking around talking like some wop, so it stopped (but not really.) By the time I was born, and my father already had one foot out the door, my brother was nearly ten and the damage was already done; he'd absorbed too much from Mom. Funny thing is, the way Mom tells it, my father used to love that she wasn't Miss America, that she was tough and spoke her native tongue with her girl-friends as she walked the streets of Brooklyn – her Florentine dialect had delighted him. Until it didn't. She didn't know why. Anyways, even _if _Italian was offered at Will Rogers – which it never will be, I can promise you that – it's not like I can really write it, and mine's really more like pidgin, peppered with slang and shortcuts no teacher would ever appreciate. Outside of the house, Keith loves to use it to prove he's not stupid, and he loves to see the surprise on other people's faces. He'll look at me and say something like, _"Che stronzo" _("What an asshole"), and it'll be like a little inside joke. But that's about as far as I go with it. I wonder if that disappoints my mother, who was already forced to leave so much behind when she fled her home.

"Because," I said quickly, more concerned with comparing my schedule with Janie's, and as my eyes scanned back and forth between the two sheets of sweaty fingerprint-stained paper, I realized something was very, very wrong. "Look at this!" I shook the papers. "We don't have any classes together."

"What?" Janie took the schedules from me and compared them for herself, only to find exactly what I had found – no classes together, just our lunch period. And lunch was only halfway through the day – how were we supposed to be expected to only be able to check up on each other halfway through? What if something happened in sixth period that was so urgent that the other had to know right away? This was a travesty. "That can't be right."

"But _it is_," I said emphatically. "Look. That's your name on yours, and mine on mine. There's no mistake."

"We're taking almost all the same classes. We planned it that way, and they screwed it up."

"What, you expected something different?" Keith laughed. Janie rolled her eyes – not helpful.

"Say, Two-Bit – where're you workin' today?"

Janie was just as curious as I was about the little odd jobs Two…_Keith_ found. "Darry roped me into helpin' out today. They're short a guy, and it's small project so they only need a few pairs of hands." He shrugged. "I figgered why not."

"Keith, why don't you just go to work with him? Clearly they could use more guys. Besides, is freelance roofing even an actual thing? Do you even know what you're _doing?"_

"Eh, I'll figure it out. Darry's the one asked me, and who am I to turn 'im down?" There had to be something wrong with all of that, but I decided to drop it. If one thing could be said about Keith's friendship with Darry Curtis, it's that Keith sure did make Darry stupid sometimes. Nobody would ever dare tell him that, but he probably already knew.

By the time we got to the school, there were already a ton of people milling about out front, waiting for the first bell. All freshman and transfer students had convocations this morning, a welcome-to-our-school sort of thing, so that's where Janie and I would be headed. I think it was in the auditorium because there were so many of us, and then the transfer students would be in some large group instruction room. As the Impala lurched to a stop, I took a shaky deep breath – here we go.

"Thanks, Two-Bit."

"Yeah, thanks, _Keith_," I said, working to hide the shake in my voice.

"Don't mention it."

"Don't go spilling tar all over anybody."

"Yeah, yeah, smartass. Get outta here, you two."

I made sure to slam the car door a little extra hard, just to be annoying – which is my job as the little sister and all, and it really pissed Keith off when I did that. Janie laughed, but Two-Bit got his revenge when he started up the car and over its roar yelled,

"Have a _great_ day, sug'!"

I cringed; turning around, I saw Keith staring back at me with a big ol' grin, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling up when I heard people around me start to laugh. I glared at him, and Keith just pressed on the horn a few times and peeled away from the school. My face was feeling hot, and I thought – perfect. Of course my dumbass brother would pull something like this, even after he knew how nervous I was. Janie (who was laughing a little bit, too) pushed on my shoulder and started guiding me towards the building.

"C'mon – we gotta get to the meeting."

"I hate him," I seethed, and Janie just shook her head, still laughing. She knew I didn't. And I didn't – but I did.

xXx

Reynolds Auditorium was a study in art deco blue-and-beige, had pretty good acoustics, and could hold roughly fifteen-hundred people at a time. I supposed this would be where Janie and I would have band and choir concerts, too, and the prospect of fifteen-hundred pairs of eyes on me made me sweat a little, but I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. Also, according to many who had gone here – not just my brother and his stupid friends – Will Rogers was haunted, and not by Will Rogers; there was apparently some kid in white who hung around this very auditorium, and people claimed to see him after-hours. I supposed that fact made this place a little more interesting than other high schools, at least.

Janie and I had gone inside early, so we were able to get seats pretty close to the front and people-watch as everyone started to file in and the stage got set up. I was trying to spot people I knew, and I did spot some familiar faces, but it was mostly a blur. At one point, Janie poked me in the shoulder and pointed out a boy to me, one I knew very well.

"There's Peter," she said, her tone lightly teasing.

"There he is," I agreed casually.

Peter Lewis was easily the sixth cutest boy in our grade, and Janie and I had known him just about for forever. He used to be a real goof back in elementary school, and he was the one who was always telling ghost stories and that if you don't hold your breath when going past a boneyard you'll get possessed or have bad luck or something. Now, though, ever since he started getting taller and had grown his hair out a bit, seemed the girls were all over him.

Including me.

But Peter barely even knows who I am anymore.

Up on stage, they had set up an American flag and the Oklahoma flag, two rows of folding chairs, and a podium. There were eight boys and girls sitting in those chairs who looked to be older students, so I wondered if they might be student government or something like that. Then there were a few adults up there; administration, I supposed, and after we said the pledge one of them stepped up to the podium, and I knew that man was Principal Vernon. My brother had gotten to know him very well in his time here. I guessed the other man was the assistant principal, but I didn't know who the other two were.

"Here we go," Janie whispered.

Principal Vernon was a tall man, a low-budget John Wayne with a worried smile. He didn't handle discipline – that was the job of the assistant principal – but my brother and his friends knew him pretty well, having made names for themselves not just in this school, but in this town. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that my brother's reputation would follow me wherever I go, and for as much as I love him, I'm not blind to the fact that his record isn't exactly squeaky-clean. So, I guess I hoped if I ever had a run-in with Principal Vernon, he wouldn't make any assumptions about me before he even got to know me.

Tapping once on the microphone, Principal Vernon cleared his throat and smiled out at us, and at first I thought that a bunch of freshman were making him nervous, but then I worried if maybe he thought this was a waste of time just as much as I did. "Good morning!" He boomed, and there was a general shouting back of the greeting. "Well, Ropers, on behalf of the entire staff and student body, I'd like to welcome you – the class of 1975 – to Will Rogers High School." For whatever reason, everybody started clapping when he said that, so I did, too. "Yes, it's very exciting. Today you join a great and storied community…"

I sunk down in my seat and looked over at Janie, who looked like she was about to nod off. It was gonna be one of _those _convocations, and I was starting to get the sinking feeling that most of the people up there were going to end up speaking. _Yawn_. You know the ones – where they get all different sorts people to say all the same sorts of things. I waited and waited for any of them to say anything that was even remotely worthwhile, but after Principal Vernon's opening remarks, nobody – not Assistant Principal McCormick, not Mrs. Armstrong (no relation to Neil), not the counselor, not the nurse, and not the senior class president, the senior class vice-president, or the senior class treasurer. I don't even know why they bothered to have them speak.

But the senior class historian said something sort of interesting. Her job was to take pictures and keep track of all the things that happened to everybody over the past four years, and now her four years of taking pictures and keeping track were almost up. _She _said that you only get to do all of this once, so you might as well do it the way you want.

I liked that.

xXx

Mrs. Everett. Home economics.

Mr. Harmon. Algebra.

Mrs. – uh, _Madame _Gardner. Fren…well, you can guess.

Mr. James. World history.

Mrs. Wilkins. English.

Miss Mitchell. Biology.

Mrs. White. Choir.

I had my entire schedule memorized within a day or two of getting it, and I still had it running on repeat in my head and knew it backward and forwards. For as well as I knew it, however, that didn't fix the problem that with passing periods being only five minutes and three flights of stairs and a lot of ground to cover between these classes, I managed to get myself two tardy passes: one going from algebra to French, and another from French to world history. It was really humiliating. It would have been better if Janie had been with me to share in the humiliation, but our schedules were so different that we couldn't even really walk together so we could both be late to our classes.

"It's my first day," I tried to tell the hall monitor the second time. Her name was Mrs. Bloom and she was probably the meanest looking lady I had ever seen in my life. She was looking at me like she was trying really hard to dress code me, like she _really _wanted to, but she couldn't. I knew she couldn't because it wasn't like the other girls didn't have similar hemlines. "I'm still figuring out my way around."

"Well, this is the second time I've seen you today, young lady, and if I see you late one more time I'll have to send you to the office."

This simply didn't make any sense to me. Why was she being so hard on me on my first day at this new school? That didn't seem fair at all. "But I don't understand," I told her. "I barely know where I'm going."

Mrs. Bloom furrowed her brow and squinted at me, which only served to make an already ugly face uglier. I wondered why all women her age wore that same shade of blue eyeshadow. Did they think it made them look good? Because it didn't. "What did you say your name was, young lady?"

And why did she insist on calling me _young lady? _How ridiculous was that! "I didn't. My name is Sadie Mathews. _I'm a freshman_."

I hope it was the attitude on that last bit than my family name that made Mrs. Bloom go red in the face and tell me to march straight to the front office, but it was still one of the most embarrassing things ever because I've _never _been sent to the office, least of all on my first day of school, but she said I was being so insolent with her that I'd be better off handled by the vice principal. So with my face burning just as red as hers and my eyes stinging, I made my way to the front office (getting lost twice), and blustering in there only to find two others: a boy in jeans and a yellow plaid tucked into his pants. He had gold-blond hair that was perfectly styled to one side, and he looked very lost. The other person in there was the secretary, and it took me a moment to place her, but when I did I felt something like hope bloom in the pit of my stomach.

Beth Martin was the sister of Evie Martin, Steve Randle's girlfriend. I knew her in the way I knew most people associated with my brother: loosely, sort of like the cousins who live a thousand miles away and you see maybe once a year, but someone you just instinctively seem to _know_. Beth, being my brother's friend's girlfriend's little sister, was about as distant a _relation _I could get, but I seriously didn't want to get in trouble on my first day, and Mrs. Bloom hadn't come with me….

"Beth?"

She looked up, and for a moment it seemed as if she couldn't place me, but then – recognition. "Sadie Mathews, right? Two-Bit's sister?" I nodded frantically. Beth smiled. "Lookit you! You look so grown up. That dress is groovy. What brings ya here?"

"Thanks. What brings _you_ here?" I asked, trying to be cool. Beth had graduated last year.

"Well, I'm takin' classes at University of Tulsa – "

"What major?"

"Social work," she said brightly. "And, well, since it's so close and my family and I could use the money to help put me through…I saw the position was open for a part-time secretary, so I took it. It's not so bad, really. They don't really care what I wear, I can get to my classes in the afternoon, and the pay's pretty good." She winked. I thought that Beth didn't look too much like her sister; there was a basic family resemblance, but Beth's hair was lighter, her body slighter, her nose longer. But they both had that same sort of…_je ne sais quoi_ about them that made them fun to be around. Maybe that was why Steve liked Evie so much because he wasn't exactly the most fun guy around. He was drawn to people unlike him. "Now, _you _answer _my _question."

I looked down at my sandals. "I was tardy a couple times."

"So?" Beth asked. "It's your first day."

"Mrs. Bloom didn't seem to get that."

Beth made a sound in understanding, and clucked her tongue. "Oh, that's bad luck. She's the absolute worst. Just ask your brother. She hates his guts."

Oh. Perfect. "That, and I guess she thinks I sassed her. She called me insolent."

She cackled. "That's something! And I'm guessing she sent you here to get a slap on the wrist."

My eyes widened. "They don't do that, do they?"

"Of course not, I'm just kidding. Well, that all sounds like a bunch of nothin' to me. Why don't you just avoid her the rest of the day and we can just pretend this never happened."

I felt my whole body relax. "_Thank _you. I owe you a bunch."

"Don't mention it," she waved off. "Your brother would kill me if I let you get in trouble."

Well, that made me feel a little silly, like doing this for me was more for her sake than mine, but I'd take it. "Thanks so much, Beth."

"Anytime! And if ya ever need anything, you've got a friend in the front office," she grinned as she wrote me a hall pass, and I smiled back. As I turned to leave, the boy sitting by the door told me,

"She's right. It is a nice dress."

I favored him with a smile.

xXx

I got to world history fifteen minutes late. I gave Mr. James my hall pass and he accepted it with a grin and nod of understanding thanks, and as I sat down in one of the few empty seats left, I started to get the feeling that my day could finally settle in and be a good one. And soon enough I'd be able to go to lunch and see my friends again, and that would be a help to my mood.

"Sadie Mathews?"

My head shot up. Mr. James had called my name, stopped right in the middle of what he'd been saying about our syllabus. He didn't look upset with me, but I had no idea what he might want. "Yes, sir?"

"Would you happen to be related to, uh, _Two-Bit _Mathews?"

There was a small ripple of laughter, but I didn't know if it was simply because of my brother's name, they knew of him, or both. I gave Mr. James a tight smile. "Yes, Keith's my brother."

"That's right, that's right – that is his name, isn't it? Well, say hi to him for me. He sat in that seat right behind you, I believe."

I glanced behind me. Great. A thing like that. "That's really something," I said.

xXx

At lunch, I counted six lunchroom monitors (because I'm a bore that counts lunchroom monitors), and I was relieved to see that none of them were Mrs. Bloom, but Mrs. Armstrong from the convocation was there, talking to an older woman with thick glasses. Mrs. Armstrong was young, and had been teaching English here for a while. I'd heard she was one of the better English teachers, but she taught upperclassmen, not underclassmen. I knew nothing about Mrs. Wilkins before today, only Mr. Syme, who Ponyboy had. I'd been hoping for him simply because I'd heard he was nice.

Sitting at my lunch table was Janie, and then our friends Ann-Marie, Kimberly, and Julie. I always figured they liked Janie more than they liked me and just put up with me, but that was probably just me being paranoid. Mom always says people like me just fine, and that these girls are always inviting me to slumber parties and to see new movies, but I just couldn't help that thought from entering my mind.

Keith said our names all sounded the same because they ended the same. He thought that was weird.

"Do you see that table over there?" Kim asked, pointing to the table a couple away from us. "It's those kids from the convocation."

I counted eight – four boys, four girls, all evened up. Sure enough, it was the same kids from the convocation. They caught me looking at them and they started jeering, and one of them flipped me off. I turned quickly away and heard them all laughing. My friends just shook their heads.

"Janie, do you have Mr. Syme second period?" Ann-Marie asked, and Janie nodded. "I have him third. We can do the homework together."

"I wanted him," I said. "I heard he was good."

"He's fine," Janie shrugged. "He does this big year-long project, like a theme? And it's due at the end of the year. It's s'posed to be about something special to you."

"Sounds like he stole it from _Are You There God? It's Me Margaret_," Julie said, but Janie shook her head.

"Sounds to me like he stole it from Ponyboy Curtis."

xXx

There were upperclassmen in the hallways each passing period handing out flyers for different clubs.

"French club callout next Thursday!"

"Join the homecoming committee!"

"First meeting of the new art club next Wednesday!"

They just kept shoving them at me. By the end of the day, I had ten.

xXx

The choir was mostly girls. I figured that would be the case, but there's nothing much better than a guy that sings, or plays an instrument. Why else would girls go crazy over The Beatles and The Rolling Stones? I mean, have you seen Robert Plant? He's gorgeous.

Mrs. White was old the way Mrs. Bloom was, but she didn't look it. She died her hair platinum blonde and her smile made her look young, and nice. That was what I cared about mostly – I just wanted people to be nice. She had us sort ourselves into our vocal groups; I'm an alto. I was one of two freshman altos, and all the rest were older girls. That made me feel a little singled out, but the whole day had felt like that.

xXx

On the way out of the choir room (which was an assault on all sides as all the flute players were released from the band room, of which Janie was a part, and she pointed at me with her flute and screamed, because I guess that was just what those insane band kids do), I stopped at the bathroom, where the worst of all worsts was waiting for me.

"You've got to be kidding," I sighed, staring down at my blood-stained underwear.

I hadn't brought anything, but I had my change purse, and counted twelve quarters. (I was pretty sure that would cover it.) I stepped out of the stall and went to grab one to put in the machine, but I lost my grip and everything inside spilled out.

That's how Janie found me after she'd put her flute away, on the floor of the girls bathroom in the performing arts hall, picking up quarters.

xXx

"So it wasn't your best day."

"Not exactly. You didn't help."

Mom looked at Keith with a raised eyebrow, and he quickly looked away from her and busied himself with putting lids on containers of tonight's leftovers. I was surprised he had decided to have dinner with us tonight – I figured he'd just go to his apartment and crash, or go get drinks with Darry or something (I'd really have to ask him about what exactly he did all day with Darry bossing him around), but when he said that he came over to hear about my day, that felt good. "What is she talking about?" She asked.

"Nothin'," he said.

"He embarrassed me in front of everybody," I said at the same time, and I looked at my brother, smiling. "Mr. James says hi, by the way."

"Does he now?"

"He says I even sat right in front of where you used to sit."

Keith suddenly fumbled with the casserole dish and almost dropped it. He looked at our mother and I, looking expectant, but I wasn't sure what it was he was waiting for us to say. I didn't know what was so significant about sitting in front of where he used to sit. Keith was weird like that, though. "Huh," he breathed, shoving the dish into the refrigerator like it was suddenly on fire. "A thing like that."

XXXXX

**AN: Thanks for reading!**


	4. Are You There, God? It's Me, Sadie

**Author's Note: Well, shoot. I did one of my disappearing acts again. Whoops! Guess this is as good a time as any to hop back in!**

**Happy reading :)**

XXXXX

Sunday mornings meant Mass.

We attended The Church of Saint Mary's, and it was a little bit out of our way, but we had been going there for my entire life. Mom started going there as soon as it was established in 1955, when Keith was seven years old and was forced to tag along. I had never had to be forced to go to church – I liked it. Not just because I believed in God, but because it made Mom so happy to see, and I knew she liked the company. Keith didn't get that part. He thinks church is all about God, but I think it's as much about God as it is about the people there with you. Jesus made the church so that we could all come together.

There was a routine to Sunday mornings that I appreciated. We went to the 10:30 because Mom liked to do the whole after-church potluck thing, mingle with everybody. Mom didn't do much talking outside the house unless she absolutely needed to, and just let people talk _at _her, but even that seemed to make her happy, to let other people's chatter wash over her and simply throw in the occasional comment. She's very easy-going and good-humored, sure, but that's mostly around the house, with us. She's a nice lady – I don't get why she wouldn't talk more. I don't think people are _that _bothered by the accent; she's been here so long that it's pretty watered down, anyways.

The other reason we go to the ten-thirty is that Sundays are one of Mom's few days off, so surprise-surprise, she likes to sleep in a little. When we go to confession, we go on Saturday afternoons, so we don't have to do that before mass, either. We just wake up naturally, eat, and get ready in our own good time, which I'm sure is the way God wants it. Where in the Bible does He say we have to go so _early? _The people who go to mass early don't love God any more than we do, so they can quit acting like it.

I had a rotation of outfits that I liked wearing and were Mom-approved. I knew girls at school who seemed to have a different dress for every week for church, but we'd never been able to afford something like that. Besides – how many dresses does a girl need? Especially for church? God didn't care what you looked like, as long as you put in a _little _bit of effort. I'm sure He appreciated that. I went with one of my favorites, a yellow tie-string waist dress with daisies, and then I slipped into white sandals and pulled back my hair, and that was that. I'd taken to wearing a floppy sunhat to church lately, too, which Mom sorta side-eyed, but it made me happy, so she would just have to deal with it. I didn't judge _her_ for still wearing her pillboxes and fascinators long after Jackie O had left them behind. Again, I don't think God really cared.

I think all three of us have a pretty different view of who God is. That's pretty normal, I think; just look at all the different denominations there are of just Christianity, let alone the number of religions there are out there to pick from. I think your best bet is to just pick the one that fits you best, instead of trying to find the one you think other people agree with. Maybe that's different from how other people think about it – I know it is – but I've never been too bothered about people believing different things from me. I don't really care about being right. We learned about other religions in the seventh grade, which was when we learned about other countries like India and China, so I've heard of Islam and Buddhism and all that, and the way I figure it, the best approach is to let them do their thing, and they can let me do mine. My teacher said reaching Nirvana was basically their version of Heaven, and that Muslims believe in _seven _Heavens, so I guess it's just different ways of getting to the same idea. I just like my way best.

That's real different from the way Mom looks at it.

The way Keith puts it, Mom's old country. She and her sisters may have fled Florence to escape a war-torn Italy, but that doesn't mean they left their home behind; they brought bits and pieces of it with them. Mom doesn't like to talk about it very much, and neither do our aunts, but I know enough about what she had been living through over there to know that she's incredibly brave, and she says God helped her through it. Keith likes to say that she was the one who got herself out of that situation; I fall somewhere in the middle. I think she had the will all on her own to leave, but that God was opening windows to help them along and make sure they got to the states safely. Keith has also said that he thinks Mom figures she owes God for that, and if that means praying on the rosary every morning and every night and going to church every Sunday and confessing to even the smallest of sins on Saturdays, then that's what she's going to do. She may have left Florence, but she brought parts of it with her, and that includes old-fashioned fear of God.

I'm not afraid of God. I figure He does things for a reason, and that's to make me a better person. The Bible says He loves me, so why should I think any different?

Keith does not believe in this version of God. My big brother gave God up as a bad job, he told me, and that if He were really such a good guy, He wouldn't have let all these bad things happen to us, and to the people we care about, or anybody, really. He's angry at God, is what I'm getting at. Very angry. I think there's a lot of things that Keith should be allowed to be angry about, even if he doesn't show it outwardly very often, but maybe if he went to God with that anger, didn't keep it all bottled up, maybe he would see that God's not so bad after all. Funny thing is, even for all that hate, ever since he's come back from Vietnam, he's been tagging along with me and Mom more and more on Sundays. Sometimes he'll come by the house first, other times he'll show up on his own, but either way, I like having him there. He didn't go much before he left for Vietnam – Mom eventually gave up and only forced him to come on holy obligated days – but before _that_, before he went to high school, some of my earliest memories are of the three of us at mass. Keith looked pretty bored back then, too, but at least he was there. Now, he's back again, and it feels like in this small way, things are almost back to normal.

xXx

_His hair is already longer than it was than the last time they'd seen him, so it wasn't like he still wasn't gone awhile. He was. But he looks more like his old self now than he did before he left, which also creates a weird sort of dysphoria when they all find him lounging on a bench at the station, shades pulled down over his eyes and a cigarette already dangling from his grinning mouth. He's in full uniform, and he's got his arms loosely crossed over his chest and one ankle crossed over as he lazily extends his long legs. His hair is already long enough to be curling some, so really, Two-Bit Mathews looks like a hippie in uniform._

_"Well, howdy," he drawls when he sees them. Two-Bit takes a drag off his cigarette and then grounds it out in the ashtray. He doesn't stand, just smiles at them and stares from behind his sunglasses. _

_Vietnam did a lot to him. Some of it is obvious. Everyone can see he's practically as muscular as Darry Curtis now (but not quite). While his hair is growing back out, it's still shorter than he likes it. When he finally takes off the shades, the smile still reaches his bruised, tired eyes. The scar from the bullet wound – which he'll show anybody who asks with a false air of bravado and pride – hides under his shirt. He's twenty-two and he gives off the airs of an older man._

_There's a lot they can't see: fear still lurking underneath. The anger. The pure, unadulterated anger that came with this whole stupid farce. The confusion. He can see it and he can feel it, and he knows it's the same for Soda, and that it'll be the same when Steve comes home. And he will come home. That is something about which not one person has any doubt. _

_Sadie has already attached herself to her big brother, and he's got her in his arms, but he's still looking at his mother and his buddies, the three brothers as close as siblings to him as the one he's got in his arms._

_"So," Two-Bit begins again, "what'd I miss?"_

xXx

As we pulled into the church, I scanned the lot for my brother's Impala, but there was no sign of it. I searched again when we got out, and as we were walking towards the building, but nada. My shoulders slumped and I figured that our time of having my dummy of a brother tagging along with us to church was finally over. It was only a matter of time, really. Maybe things were really starting to get better, normal enough that he didn't need or want to come anymore. Keith didn't come for God, I knew that much, but it was nice. Mom didn't seem to notice as we walked inside and she pulled out her fan – our church was always pretty warm, and I was hoping one of these days it would get some air conditioning, prayed for it sometimes, even – but maybe she was just better at keeping her expectations low.

Saint Mary's was fairly new compared to some of the other churches in town, but Catholic churches are special in that it seems that all of them are built to both look and feel as if they're as old as the Vatican. I think it's the stained glass and the organ music, and probably the incense, too. There aren't many Catholics in Tulsa – or Oklahoma, for that matter – so our church seems to have done its best to stick out amongst all the Baptists and Methodists. I've been in Baptist and Methodist churches before, and they feel almost sterile compared to Saint Mary's. And they don't hardly care about the Madonna, which is just crazy to me. The woman gave birth to the Son of God, held that son's dead body in her arms, and then had to go through his rising and ascension to Heaven while he left her behind. Mother Mary gave this world a gift, and these other people just ignore it. I just can't believe a thing like that. If there's no Mary, there's no Jesus, and they sure seem to like him _bunches_. You just don't feel Mary in those other churches, so to me, they just don't feel right.

The procession had ended, and there was still no sign of my brother. I was starting to feel a bit anxious; I really wanted him here. Penitential Rite went by, and still no sign of him, and by the time we started in on the kyrie, I must have looked like a darned fool, my head practically on a swivel as I watched the door. Mom was looking at me funny, a face that said _what's wrong with you, you need to be taking this seriously, _and I was, I always do, but I just felt disappointed.

But then - there he was. Right in the middle of the first hymn, an entrance to music from the whole congregation. Keith Mathews sauntered into our church in sunglasses, jeans, and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes clearly rolled up in his sleeve. He hadn't shaved yet, and I was almost certain the sunglasses were hiding some serious dark circles. Never one to mind the attention, he didn't just slip into a back pew; no, he came all the way up to sit with us in our regular pew, and when he saw me, we smiled at each other and I moved over to give him room to sit with us.

I was happy to see him.

"You're late," I mumbled, our heads bowed in prayer, but nobody could hear us over the father's booming baritone. He still hadn't taken his sunglasses off.

"Better late than never," Keith smirked.

I supposed so.

xXx

"I'm glad you came today."

Keith looked at me funny at first, but then he smiled. "Yeah, well. What else am I gonna do on a Sunday morning? Sleep? _Nah._"

We were sitting at a white folding table in white folding chairs under a tree outside the church. We needed the shade – Tulsa wasn't much better in September than it was in August. I was sort of wishing I had brough sunglasses, too, because the sun was shining so bright, and I was starting to sweat a bit, too. I fanned myself with one of the church fans and blew some hair out of my face.

"It's lunchtime, ya know. I don't think you're exactly bein' put out."

"Guess not. And don't act so surprised – ain't I been comin' here with y'all a lot lately?"

"It's still nice that you came," I reiterated. "I like it when you're here. So does Mom."

We both looked over at her. Mom was doing her usual mingling, talking to the other church ladies and asking every now and then if she could get somebody a plate of food, continuously postponing getting her own plate so she could serve somebody else. She does this pretty much every week. It's a little frustrating to watch, actually. Like, I just want to grab her by the shoulders and steer her away from everything and tell her to talk and eat like everybody else was doing instead of playing at waitress. She does enough work like that as it is.

Strangely enough, though, I sort of get where she's coming from. She just wants to fit; just wants people to like her. I get that, completely. I know there's Janie, and the girls I sit with at lunch, but it's still…lacking, I feel. Keith has never had trouble with getting people to like him, and he's got probably the most-envied group of friends in the entire city. I mean, that's not to say everybody wants to be a part of that, but they want something like it. What my brother and his friends have is incredibly rare, and Mom always liked to remind him of that growing up. I don't think Keith ever needed the reminder.

"Are you hungry?" I asked. I myself was working on a piece of Mrs. Peterson's pineapple upside-down cake, but my brother just made a face from behind his shades, and that's how I knew the hangover was next-level. I tried to contain my smile, but my lips still twitched. "I see. So. What'd you get up to last night?"

"None of your business," he drawled, not sharing, but his tone was still playful. Sometimes he felt up to sharing, but it was always a sanitized version of what had transpired. Thing is, I'm fourteen now, and he doesn't need to protect me from _every_thing. Mom's saying all the time that I'm a young woman, so I think it's time I start getting treated like one. I narrowed my eyes at him.

"C'mon," I whined. "Keith, if you don't tell me, I'll bring back some of the tuna casserole Mrs. Purcell made." And that stuff made him gag on a _good _day. Just the mere mention of it was enough to make him grimace. Nearly every week, Mrs. Purcell brought that casserole, and that was because it was one of the only things she could decently make. It definitely isn't the worst thing I've ever eaten, but it looks and smells like dog food. "Please?"

"Fine," he said huffily. "If you _must _know, Steve, Soda, and I went downtown and hit up a few bars, met with some girls, all that jazz. It was a real swell time."

I narrowed my brow. "Steve flirted, too? But what about Evie?" I asked, feeling very concerned all of a sudden. Evie's mother owned a salon in town, and she was chomping at the bit for the day she got to take over. Evie was the one who always did my hair when I went, and she always gave a discount because my brother and her boyfriend had been friends forever. She was tough, but she was also funny and a good person, so the idea that Steve might be going behind her back made me feel funny. I didn't care how rough he'd had it since he got back – that was no excuse to cheat. But Two-Bit shook his head.

"All looky no touchy on his end." Then a wolfish grin spread across his face, and suddenly I was sorry I had ever asked him. "But me and Soda had some fun. _Ooh_, the things we got up to! I don't think even a trip to confession could save me after all _that_."

I scowled, rolling my eyes, and he started cackling. Oh, brother, indeed. While he was busy peeing himself laughing so hard – at what I don't know, maybe the look on my face because it's not like he's even all that funny – I spotted an old family friend. Sliding my eyes over to my brother, I decided this would be as good a way as any to shut him up.

"Audrey!" I called. My mother always hated when I yelled a long distance, but who really cares? Audrey was all the way over under a tree, and I didn't feel like getting up to fetch her. Besides, it was worth it to see the surprise on Keith's face as he heard her name and followed my gaze to see Audrey look up, smile, and wave at us before starting to make her way over to where we were sitting. Truth be told, my brother looked a bit mortified, and started patting his pockets for a comb he hadn't kept there in years.

Audrey Linton was only a year younger than my brother. We'd known her and her family forever just because we went to church and school with them, but Keith's sophomore year, her mom and our mom conspired to get the two of them to go out one night. It was probably some conspiracy from both sides to get them to marry Catholic in a state where those are incredibly hard to come by. Well, Audrey's pretty and all, and my brother saw a lot of girls in high school (and now, apparently), but I guess they just weren't each other's type. It worked out, though, because I think they're sort of friends. But now, Keith was watching her with wary eyes behind his sunglasses, and I think it was a combination of his disheveled appearance, the fact that he hadn't seen her in a long time – even with his more frequent attendance – and that Audrey was just starting to show in her pregnancy.

A lot can change in a short time, I guess.

"Sadie, Two-Bit!" She greeted as she approached us, grinning wide. Recovering quickly, my brother stood up and matched her smile, and they hugged.

"It's so good to see you," Audrey breathed, looking my brother up and down. "I mean, I knew you were back, of course, but…I mean, I just don't know how I could have missed you."

"I don't know either," Keith said smartly. "I'm hard to miss. Here, why don't you sit down."

"Did you like the service today?" She asked, but she was mostly asking me. I shrugged.

"It was fine. What'd you think?"

"I thing Father Simmons talks about the same three things in a rotation, that's what I think. It all sorta blurs together, especially when it's this hot. I can barely focus," she laughed. Audrey turned back to my brother. "Nice entrance you made today."

"Good thing I like the attention, then, huh?"

Audrey laughed. "I guess so. So? How's tricks?"

Keith shrugged. "They're good. Been back almost two years, ya know."

She nodded. "I do know. I would've visited, but I was livin' up in Iowa for a little while, and then, well…" She gestured down to her stomach sheepishly. "Well, you can see. He left me high and dry, so I came back home."

"When are you due?" I asked, trying to contain my excitement. Nothing was more exciting in church circles than babies and weddings. Funerals came in third, mostly because funeral food was better than regular Sunday potluck food. And funerals were just great for gossip disguised as remembrance.

"March." She grimaced. "I'm carrying sorta big already."

"Nah, ya look great," Keith reassured her, and both of us favored him with a smile; Audrey because she appreciated the kindness, and me because that's the part of my brother I like best – when he's sweet. Not when he's bragging about having sex with some nameless blonde.

"So, what else have you been up to?" Audrey asked, clearly not wanting to talk about her body anymore.

Keith told her all about how after he had come home, he was still sort of weak from the infection he had gotten after he'd been shot, so at first, he really hadn't gotten up to much. After he was mostly better, though, he sorta bounced around from job to job, nothing ever feeling quite right to him until he settled into what he's doing now with all the odd jobs he does, just looking for ways to occupy himself and keep himself busy. Other than that, though, things aren't too much different from what they were before he got drafted – he's got all his friends together again and everything, he's made enough money over the past couple years to have his own place, and things are copasetic. The only deviations in the plan he had from before he went over to Vietnam was that he wasn't really seeing anybody, and that he's not going to be drafted by the Dodgers anytime soon, but _c'est la vie_.

Audrey took it all in and nodded slowly, listening to him the whole time, because if there's two things my brother can do very, very well, it's tell a story and keep your attention while he does it. Even the most boring of things are never boring when he's the one telling them. "Well, I'm glad you made it home."

"Me, too, brother," he said, shaking his head. "And how 'bout you? How's it feel bein' back in Tulsa? You ain't goin' back to sellin' tickets at the movie theatre, are ya?"

"No _way_. Teenage Audrey hated that job, there's no way I'd ever go back to it. Especially since a _certain someone _was always buggin' me while I was working."

Keith laughed – guilty as charged, then. I was loving all of this talk. It felt so _adult_. I didn't even feel like I needed to talk myself, just wanted to let their conversation wash over me in waves. I guess I could get where Mom was coming from, then, when all she wanted was to sit back and listen to all her church lady friends. There's something soothing about watching two people have a conversation. Especially when those people clearly enjoy each other's company. Two old friends catching up.

"…and, well, I'm just worried everybody's gonna judge me, ya know? I know the church _says _that they'll let me baptize the baby, but you know there's gonna be whispers."

I had zoned out for a moment, and all of a sudden, both Audrey and Keith were looking very serious. Keith was serious more and more often these days, and I don't know if that's just part of growing up, but it's not my favorite look on him. "Yeah," he nodded somberly. "I know. It's _your_ kid, honey. At the end of the day, what matters is what _you _want, so you should just ignore those assholes. Get what I'm sayin'?"

She nodded, but she still looked kind of sad. "Yeah. And it's what my parents want, too, ya know? But, well, it hasn't been all smooth-sailing the past few months. They're PO'd about the dad, and they're just as worried 'bout how this looks as I am."

"Trust me, Audrey, ya ain't the first unwed mother these guys have seen. I won't let anybody give ya any shit," he said, and I knew he meant it. Keith and his friends were always cocksure that they could do just about anything they put their minds to, and believe it or not, a lot of their pursuits were noble ones.

"Thanks, Two-Bit," she grinned shyly.

She had to leave after that, but Keith and I were still stuck here, waiting for Mom to get done. Keith could have left at any time, but I guess he just wanted to touch base with her, and it's not like we had lingered that long anyways – the service had only ended about forty minutes ago, and there were still plenty of people milling about. It's just that, well, we were much too old to go play with a bunch of little kids, and too young to want to talk to the adults, and since I'm not particularly chatty and Keith was in a mood, we just went back to talking to each other.

"Ya know," I began, raring to tease him some more, "girls like Audrey are the sorts of girls you should be dating."

Keith fixed me with a look. "Sadie, cut it out. Besides, she's _pregnant_. I'm not gonna date a chick that's knocked-up."

"That's rude," I frowned. "She can't do anything about it. She's not some lesser person just because she's gonna have a baby."

"That's not what I mean," he sighed. "I just…look, I'm not lookin' to become some kid's father figure right now, okay?"

Oh, but he was mine. He always had been. I understood that he didn't want to tag on that extra responsibility, and that Audrey probably wasn't looking to date, but if she was, she could do a lot worse than my brother. Whether he liked it or not, no matter how much of a goof he was, no matter how strange he'd been lately, he was the most important man in my life, besides God.

Heck – I knew for a fact that my brother was more important to me than God could ever hope to be.

XXXXX

**AN: Stay safe, stay healthy, (stay patient with me), and thanks for reading!**


	5. A Not-So-Friendly Rivalry

**Author's Note: Mrs. Girdlé is This Is Melodrama's creation, featured in her stories and _God Help the Girls_. I just think she's the best art teacher Will Rogers has to offer, is all. ;)**

**Happy reading :)**

XXXXX

I was quickly learning that middle school and high school were two totally different beasts. The homework was one thing, and staying up as late as I needed to in order to get it all done was making me feel sick to my stomach. I love sleeping; it sounds stupid, but I really do, I _need _my sleep. Sleep is something you can feel, smell, taste. Sleep is divine. What _wasn't _so divine was getting even a minute less than eight hours. I needed those eight hours, and right now, I wasn't getting them, and it was throwing me off. I wanted to cry when my alarm went off in the mornings because it felt like I had just crawled underneath my covers, and Will Rogers High School is nowhere near as comfortable or as inviting as my brass bed in my purple room.

But it was more than just the homework and missing sleep – it was…_everything_. It's hard to explain, but I went into high school hoping for a fresh start, but instead found myself feeling like I was being drowned out, and worse than I was in middle school because Will Rogers is absolutely _huge_. There were so many people from other middle schools who I didn't know, didn't even know how to approach. And not only were there all these new freshman from these other schools, but there were the upperclassmen as well.

The upperclassmen hated freshmen. The seniors were the worst, but the juniors looked down on the sophomores and freshmen, and the sophomores – with no one else left to hate – hated the freshmen. Seems the older you get, the more people you despise, but the hate is more concentrated when you're younger. The seniors didn't like anybody younger than them, but the dislike was spread out; the sophomores, having just escaped the clutches of being the youngest in the school, had only the freshmen to look down on, so it seemed more severe. We were all too clueless, too young, had too many questions, were too, well, _fresh_. If I have to hear the 'fresh_meat' _joke one more time, I swear, I will explode.

When my brother and his friends were in high school, they'd had to deal with guys from the West side of town looking down on them, getting in fights with them, blaming them for anything and everything that went wrong. (I'm sure they were asking for it some days, though I'm not so sure Keith would agree with me.) These days, it's not quite like that, but every time Janie and I make our way up those front steps, I still can't seem to escape that feeling of being just so, so small – a feeling I had been hoping to escape. I simply disappear into Will Rogers High School, get carried away in the current in its sea of people.

Something needed to be done about that.

Problem is, I'm better at making plans than I am at actually executing them.

Janie doesn't have that problem, though. When she wants something, she will do everything in her power to get it. And right now, what she wanted more than anything, apparently, was women's athletics. This sort of threw me for a loop; I had no idea Janie wanted to play sports so bad. My interest in sports stopped with my brother, who was a nut for baseball and could have gone to the majors if he hadn't been drafted instead to Vietnam – at least, that's what he had told me. Otherwise, I couldn't really care less about them. I liked going swimming when it was hot, and riding my bike, or even dancing, but besides being forced to watch ballgames growing up, they just didn't do much for me. I thought Janie was the same, but apparently not. We were sitting at lunch one day when she decided to tell us all about this new interest of hers.

"I mean, I have a cousin in Louisiana who plays tennis. She has three letters. Why can she play tennis in Louisiana, but I can't in Oklahoma?"

Ann-Marie curled her lip. "Since when do you want to play tennis? I've never heard you talk about wantin' to play tennis."

Janie just shrugged. "It's not so much that I want to play tennis, I just think it's stupid that girls can play whatever sport they want in some places, but all you can do here is be a Pom-Pom girl." One of my brother's ex-girlfriends had been a Pom-Pom girl. I didn't see anything wrong with it – they always seemed to have a lot of fun and knew all the cutest boys in school.

"So what do you want to do then?" Kim asked. "If you don't wanna play tennis, and you don't want to be a cheerleader, then what?"

Janie thought about it for a moment while she picked at the corn on her tray. I was glad I brought my lunch from home – all of the school food always looked so…sad. Mom said it was too expensive, anyways. I wasn't sure I agreed with _that_, but there was really no arguing with my mother. It just wasn't worth it to get into it with her – she always won. "I'm a good swimmer. Maybe I'd like to do that," she said easily. "You've all seen me swim, ain't I pretty good? Or maybe I could do track."

"What even made you think about all this?" Julie asked. She was playing with the charm bracelet on her wrist, something she was always adding to. I remember back in the sixth grade, it seemed like every girl in our class had wanted one of those silver charm bracelets, and one by one, almost all of them got one. I never did. It was sort of nice to see that Julie still wore hers, otherwise all of that fuss would have seemed like a waste of time.

"Saw a story on the news the other night about how they introduced a bill that would make it so you can't discriminate based on sex. They said it would apply to places like work and school, so the school would have to have girls' sports anyways."

"So it's a law about sports?" I asked. That seemed a little ridiculous to me, to have laws about just athletics, but Janie shook her head.

"Not just sports. All sorts of things. It just would mean that you can't stop someone from doing somethin' just because they're a girl. Some guy from Indiana came up with it, I think."

Oh. Well, that made more sense. It actually sounded pretty good to me. I've heard of the Equal Rights Amendment and all that, but I guess it wasn't going anywhere because nobody had talked about it on the news for a while. I'm all for men and women being equal, but I still didn't really care about sports all that much. I wondered if this new law would mean that we could start wearing pants to school every day, not just on Fridays if we wanted. I saw a boy trying to look up a girl's skirt the other day – you can't do that with a pair of pants. But maybe boys should just stop looking up girls' skirts.

I still wasn't quite sure why Janie suddenly cared so much, though, about sports _or _politics. Maybe she always had, and I just hadn't noticed. Either way, I decided then and there that if this was important to her, I should help her get it. That's what friends do for each other. My brother helped his friends out no matter what, whether he agreed with them or not, because that's just what you're supposed to do, especially when you've been friends with somebody for so long. Maybe we could help Will Rogers High School get girls in sports _and_ pants before the rest of the country did.

xXx

While Janie was looking to become some sort of modern day cross between Susan B. Anthony and Althea Gibson, I was still trying to figure out how to make something of myself in this school. I was sick of how I had just allowed myself to fade into the background all these years, and it was time for that to change. If Keith and I had been born closer together, I'm sure he would have overshadowed me, and with nearly ten years between us, he still does in some ways. I'm not even sure most people knew that Two-Bit Mathews had a sister, let alone that the sister was _me_. Personally, I don't mind that we're different, or that he's a lot older than I am, and I think it's actually kind of funny when people learn that he's my brother. I'll tell somebody that my brother is Keith Mathews, and then when they get confused, I'll correct myself and tell them my brother is Two-Bit, and once they've got that down, they always ask,

"_He's _your brother?"

And I have no other choice but to say yes.

Some people are impressed. They'll tell me that their older siblings or cousins know him, that they remember all the pranks he used to pull and the fights he got into and the homeruns he hit. They remember his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends. They remember how he was friends with Johnny Cade and Dallas Winston, and the dirty version of the school song he had come up with, and when he and his friends crashed the summer cotillion. My brother was some sort of living legend in these parts.

Some people aren't so impressed. They'll tell me that their older siblings or cousins know him, that they remember all the pranks he used to pull and the fights he got into and the homeruns he hit. They remember his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends. They remember how he was friends with Johnny Cade and Dallas Winston, and the dirty version of the school song he had come up with, and when he and his friends crashed the summer cotillion. People hated him for the same reasons they loved him.

When people gushed about him, I had to pretend that he was a real bother; when they complained about him, I felt the need to defend him. It was strange, how you can be both annoyed and endeared by someone. But maybe that's just how it is with the people you love.

However, nobody in my home economics class knew who my brother was, and that was something of a first for me, and something I found myself not minding too much. I could just walk in there each morning, say hi to my table partner, and say the pledge and listen to the morning announcements without any fuss. My table partner was a girl named Betty Howard, a sophomore, but she was one of the nice ones. Maybe the older kids were only mean when they got together in their cliques; individually, they weren't so bad. Betty was always asking me about my weekend, if I was liking the teachers and the school, things like that.

One morning, she asked me, "Are you thinking of joining anything?"

I glanced at her as I set my notebook and pencils out. It occurred to me that I didn't have any idea what sort of things Betty was into, and that I hardly ever asked her any questions about herself like she did me, nothing beyond _How are you, how was your weekend, did you think the homework was hard? _And it wasn't because I didn't like her; it was likely because I was just so nervous and worried about being polite to someone older than me that I just kept my trap shut.

"Like what?" I asked stupidly. I could have hit myself.

"I don't know," she shrugged. "What are you interested in?"

I bit my lip, thinking. "I'm in choir. I sing at church, so I figured I might as well join the school's."

"Cool, what else?"

What else? I needed more? But then I remembered that I wanted to put myself out there, get to know more people, and I knew that one of the best ways to do that was to join clubs and get involved. But there was something scary about that.

"I don't know," I shrugged, writing out the header for today's notes on sewing. I could already sew and make my own clothes from patterns, but I needed to take the class for the credit. Boys had to take home economics now, too, but there weren't any boys in my class, which I thought was odd. My brother hadn't had to take it back when he was in high school, and he said he dodged a bullet. I thought it was idiotic that boys thought they could get out of housework, and that made me remember Janie and her talk about that new law that man from Indiana proposed.

"Well, what do you like? What are your hobbies? You're probably in a language, you could join your language's club."

Things that I liked…well, I liked going to church, singing, singing _at_ church, reading, and…well… "Sometimes I draw, a little." Gosh, I really made myself sound like a bore. It's always so hard to tell people what it is you like or who you are as a person right when they ask. It's like I completely forget who I am.

But Betty lit up and pointed her pencil at me. "Hey, perfect! If you like drawing you should join the art club. They've only had one meeting so far, and I loved it last year. You should definitely come. We learn how to use different media, help design sets for the theatre department and dances, stuff like that. You'll love it, promise."

This might seem odd and sort of lame, but this was a big step for me, and it was a hard one for me to take. Just because I liked to doodle sometimes didn't mean I was any good at art; they would probably all laugh at me. But I guess these are the little risks you have to take. I smiled at Betty. "I'd love to," I said, and Betty lit up.

"We meet tomorrow right after school in Mrs. Girdlé's room 'til four-thirty. We're planning out what we want to do for the rest of the semester, so it's really important you be there so you have a say."

Democracy in action, then. I nodded, and as class started and I thought about it more and more, the more I thought – _knew _– that this was a good idea.

xXx

It was not a good idea. At least, not at first.

But more on that later.

xXx

"Sadie! Sadie, wait up."

Janie rushed up to me through the throng of band, choir, and orchestra students milling around in the performing arts hall, many of them carrying around clunky instruments both in and out of their cases. She looked very excited about something, so I knew I was about to get an earful. "What's up?" I asked.

"I've had the best idea," she said. I raised an eyebrow, which was my signal for her to keep talking. "So you know how I was talking the other day about how we should get girls' athletics at the school?" I nodded. "Well, I've decided to run for student government, and when I win, I could make that one of my initiatives."

My eyes went wide. "Really?" I asked. "Student government? Since when do you want to be in student government?"

Janie rolled her eyes. "Since _now_. C'mon, I thought you'd be excited for me," she said, narrowing her eyes.

"I am! I'm just surprised, is all. I never knew you wanted to do anything like that. I think it's a great idea," I told her at the suspicious look she gave me. "You have my vote all the way."

That got her to smile. "I was sorta counting on it, but thanks. So why don't you come over after school, we can start making posters and putting together my speech and all that."

Janie seemed really excited, and of course I wanted to help her, but I couldn't. Not today. "I would, Janie, but I sort of already have plans."

"Plans?" She repeated, her voice sounding all weird, like the idea of me having plans was ridiculous. "With who?"

"It's an art club meeting," I said simply. "A girl in my home-ec class said I should join."

Janie made a thoughtful noise. "Well, you do like painting, I guess. And you won that award in seventh grade."

I felt myself blush all the way to the tips of my ears. "Eh, it wasn't that good."

"Are you kidding? It was really good! I swear, Sadie, you gotta get some confidence and learn how to take a compliment. People'll stop saying nice things to you if you always get so mopey when they say 'em."

Yeah, but people _never _said nice things about me; they never _noticed _me. So what one of my paintings had won an award in the seventh grade? Nobody but probably Janie remembered, and my mother. I kept the ribbon pinned to my corkboard, blue with gold lettering. I had been real proud of myself at the time, but…I don't know. Art was still fun, but I had always thought there was probably someone else who deserved to win more.

"Well," Janie went on with a sigh, "we can get together this weekend and work on it. Okay?"

"Okay."

"And you know that homecoming is coming up, too. We should go dress shopping! Wouldn't I look good in navy?"

Oh, gosh. There was already homecoming week to worry about now, too, apparently. I liked school dances, but they were always something that we got out of class early to do and be home by the end of the day, and everybody would end up dancing with everybody else so nobody felt left out. I got the feeling that wouldn't be quite the case at a Will Rogers homecoming dance.

xXx

Mrs. Girdlé's classroom had a view of the courtyard, and sunlight streamed through the studio windows. It smelled like clay, wet paint, and chalk. Her walls were covered in student artwork and posters explaining color theory, the rules of composition, and the elements and principles of art. She had plants on the windowsill alongside models of hands and the human form. Her bookshelves were full of books about specific artists and artistic periods and styles. Instead of regular desks and chairs, she had studio tables and stools. I relaxed into it instantly.

There were people already milling about when I walked in after the last bell, and I scanned the faces for anyone I knew, but the only person I knew was Betty, who waved at me to come sit next to her. I set my books down and hopped up onto the high stool, and she smiled at me.

"Glad you came!" She said.

"Glad I decided to come," I smiled back.

"Who's this, Betty?"

I followed the sound of the new voice, and this was how I met Nancy Wheeler. Nancy was a senior, tall with pin-straight brunette hair and an upturned nose. She looked at the two of us with a blank, unreadable expression. I noted that she was wearing a matching set of earrings, necklace, and a bracelet, all gold and expensive-looking. I hadn't seen her around school before, but I generally tried to avoid areas that the seniors liked to hang out in.

"Nancy, this is Sadie Mathews. Sadie, this is Nancy Wheeler, club president."

I raised my eyebrows. "Did you guys already hold officer elections?"

Nancy gave me a small smile. "We had them last week. You weren't there, so you wouldn't know." Oh. Okay, then. Just seemed awfully fast to me to have already elected officers. Honestly, I was sort of astounded that the art club needed officers. "Mathews – that sounds familiar."

I gave her a weak smile. "Well, it's a common last name." However, I think I could see the unfortunate direction in which this conversation was going.

"One T?" She asked, and I nodded slowly. "I think I know your brother. Two-Bit?" She said the name as politely as she could, I could tell, but it was difficult for her.

I nodded again. "Yeah, that'd be him."

She scrunched up her nose, but kept smiling. "He dated my sister for a little while when they were in school together."

I narrowed my eyes, thinking. Out of all of his past girlfriends, I couldn't think of a Wheeler. Besides – if this sister looked anything like Nancy, she wasn't exactly my brother's type. He had always gone for blondes, for the most part. But maybe Nancy's sister dyed her hair – fake blondes worked for him, too. "What's her name?" I asked.

"Susanna, but most people call her Susie."

Susie Wheeler…didn't ring a bell. "I'm sorry, I don't remember her. But my brother's dated a lot of girls, so…"

As soon as that slipped out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. Behind me, I heard Betty gasp. Nancy's eyes narrowed into slits, and I really did feel bad, I did, but it's true – my brother's had a lot of girlfriends ("girlfriends"), most of them not exactly steady. He must have dated Susie during one of his off periods with Kathy. Something told me telling Nancy that would make the situation worse, though. To tell you the truth, though, I couldn't see why everybody was getting so bent out of shape about a couple of older siblings who couldn't have gone on more than a couple of dates.

"Huh," Nancy finally said. "Well, Susie told me all about him. Said he was tall, handsome, and absolute white trash."

And with that, Nancy flipped her hair and walked to the front of the room so that she could start the meeting. Betty looked over at me and quietly asked what the heck that was all about, but all I could focus on was that white trash comment. Mrs. Girdlé finally bustled into the classroom, an older woman who seemed to think cat-eyes were fashionable. She clapped her wrinkled hands together, which seemed to get everyone settled – except me, because I was still reeling. If Nancy thought, _Keith_ was white trash, then she probably thought _I _was white trash.

"Alright, everybody, nice to see you all again. Good to see a few new faces as well," she added, her eyes passing over me and a few others. "This week we're focusing on planning out what we'll be doing the rest of the semester. Of course, there are a few things we do every year – we'll be working on homecoming decorations and the winter dance – but otherwise we're free to work on whatever projects and with whatever media we'd like. I'd like to open up the floor to suggestions now."

Over the next half an hour, Nancy and Mrs. Girdlé approved watercolor, pastels, oil, and clay workshops. I was glad that most of it was going to be painting and drawing because I was no good with clay – art award or not. I wanted desperately to be at those workshops, but there was a part of me that was nervous, too, what with Nancy Wheeler there, staring me down every time she turned around. I had no idea what I had done – my brothers actions were not my own. But Nancy was just one person. If I could do my best to ignore her, maybe even try to smooth things over with the mistakenly snide comment I had made, and the not-so-mistaken one _she _had told. So I would stay.

Even with what happened next.

As the classroom door banged open, I could hear someone calling my brother's name – not his real one, of course – from down the hall, and then there he was, just as Mrs. Girdlé was writing out the final schedule for the semester.

The sight of my brother bursting into that classroom made me freeze. Everything and everyone in the room went still. He looked upset, his sunglasses pushed up on his head to hold his hair back and his hands planted on his hips. Nancy shot me a look and raised a brow, almost as if this was somehow proving her sister's point. Looking at him just then, I could somehow see what she was getting at. It wasn't so much what he was wearing or anything, but the way he talked and acted.

And I was his sister.

"Oh – hello, Mr. Mathews. Can I help you…?"

Mrs. Girdlé, though she seemed to know him, was obviously confused, and I was – to put it simply – mortified. Beth Martin came in a couple seconds behind him, her heels clacking against the tile, and I guessed she had pulled an afternoon shift at the front desk. She looked incredibly annoyed. "Mrs. Girdlé, I tried to stop him."

"Bethy, hush. You know what's going on," he said, and started scanning the room before his eyes lighted on me. "You. We need to go."

xXx

I vividly remember the day after my brother got his draft notice. Everyone in our house was tense. All of Keith's friends were tense – especially Steve, who found out soon after that he would be going with him. The day after we found out was worth than the day of; I cried the day of, and so did our mother, while Keith stood stoically, for once not knowing what to say. The next day, though, was awkward. I felt like I had to tiptoe around my family, and I could tell that Keith felt the same way. To this day I get the feeling that Keith thinks he brought something horrible down upon our family, that it was his fault that all of this was happening. At the time, I didn't really know much more about the war in Vietnam besides the fact that they showed footage of it on TV every night, and that Sodapop had gone and come back. Other boys in town had gone and come back; others hadn't. But even just a couple years ago, all I really cared about was that it was taking my brother from me, and not so much about how it affected everyone else. Just how it affected me.

I learned that my mother was thinking that way, too.

It's not something I expected from her. When Keith was gone, she would tell everybody how proud she was of him, how nice it was to receive his letters, how we prayed for him. We put on brave smiles because it was either that or let how completely we missed him show on our faces. But the day after his draft notice came, I eavesdropped on Mom and Keith after I had gone to bed, sitting at the top of the stairs as they talked in the kitchen. My mother was crying, alternating between English and Italian as she let her sorrow spill over.

"There's nothin' I can do, Mama." It was never a good sign when Keith started calling her Mama again. It either meant he was trying to get himself out of trouble or soothe her – usually from the anger she was feeling about whatever trouble he had gotten himself into. And he had certainly gotten himself into trouble this time; it's just that this, for once, wasn't his fault. "There's no gettin' outta this."

I expected Mom to resign herself to this fact, to tell him that she knew, that she understood that this was the way things were supposed to be. But instead of that, she said – in the weakest, most strained, most _desperate _tone of voice that I haven't heard her use before or since –

"My sisters and I left our home, our parents, everything we had ever known to escape war. We came here thinking everything would be so easy. And now I could lose you to a war I do not understand."

I had heard the stories time and again from Mom and my aunts, her sisters, about how the six of them – yes, six – had fled their war-torn country, sent away by my grandparents, and how said grandparents had refused to come with them. Italy was their homeland; if it died, they would die with it. My grandparents didn't die in the war, and Italy is obviously still there, but they died before I was born. But my mother and her sisters were here, spread across this country, separate from each other now, but so close in the beginning. Time had spread them apart physically. But they understood back then what they had to do; they had a choice to make: they could either stay and risk death, or run and find their own paths. My mother and her sisters crossed the ocean to Ellis Island, where they settled in Brooklyn. My mother could understand that war, knew concretely in her mind that it was flee or die. But Vietnam was confusing, day in and day out, and she could once again lose someone important to her. Mom had her sisters to get her through; Keith wasn't going to have anybody.

That's the thought that kept me up most nights. Yes, I worried every day that he was going to die, but mostly, I was sad for my brother. We knew from their letters that he and Steve were not together, not after basic training. Now, Keith can make friends with just about anybody, even the people he doesn't like, but I know that even though he doesn't admit to loving us because it would hurt his reputation or something, I know he needs to be around people he actually _cares _about so he can drop the façade for a while.

I worried about him getting lonely.

And now, sitting outside of the Tastee Freeze, watching him forego his Coke for cigarette after cigarette as I worked on my milkshake, I worried again.

"What happened, exactly?" I asked quietly.

Two-Bit stubbed out his third cigarette. He wasn't even finishing them. That was very unlike him. "Guess it all started when he got laid off. Shop he's been workin' at is downsizin', and since he was the newest guy, they let him go. That's probably what triggered it. When Evie got back from the salon last night, she found him in the bathroom, passed out cold. She called the ambulance, and then she called his dad. He seemed to be doin' okay when I saw 'im, or better, at least. But I guess Evie sorta gave him an ultimatum – either he cleans himself up, or she's done."

Wow. I didn't really know what to say at first; what do you say after hearing something like that? One of my brother's best friends had gotten seriously strung-out, and one misstep, and his whole life could be over. Steve and Evie had been together since they were fourteen years old – if that's not love, I don't know what is. Steve must have seriously screwed up for her to be talking like that. "Wow," was all I could say. "So…what, then? Rehab, or something?"

Two-Bit sighed long and hard. "No," he finally said.

My eyes widened. "_No?" _I repeated. "Then…what?"

"John" – that's Steve's dad, John Randle. He was my eighth grade math teacher. – "he says that he wants to try one more thing before he sends him off on a, uh, _retreat._"

"What's that?"

Two-Bit grimaced. "He's sending him to Kansas_._"

_Kansas?_ Kansas! The Randles had family there, I think, an aunt and uncle of some sorts, maybe some cousins. Sounds like Mr. Randle was sending Steve off to the family farm to shuck corn and milk cows. I couldn't imagine having to wake up so early to do all those chores. Our Aunt Gianna lives on a farm in Idaho, and the last time we went to visit her, Keith looked like he wanted to kill himself the whole time. He said it was the most boring place he had ever visited in his life. It didn't help that Aunt Gianna has nine kids. Yeah. _Nine_. Can you imagine? Keith and I have twenty-three cousins.

"For how long?"

Keith rested his head in his hand and stared at some far-off point over my shoulder. There was practically no one here – people went to the Dairy Queen these days. Keith liked Tastee Freeze, though, even though all he ever got was Cokes. I liked to mix it up. "Can't say," he finally answered. "Until he's clean, I guess. But who knows how long that'll take, or how long his aunt and uncle'll put up with 'im. He's got a coupl'a cousins there, but from what I remember, they're kinda dull. So."

I was really struggling to picture this. Steve? On a farm? I tried to imagine him on a tractor, in a field, milking a cow, chasing chickens. Mr. Randle thought this was going to help his son somehow. I couldn't imagine how milking a cow would get Steve to stop doing drugs. There was probably more to this plan than I was seeing, but I was still confused. I decided not to push it for the time being, though.

"They're shippin' him out tomorrow," Keith said, recovering. I knew, then, what he would be doing tonight, and where he would be. Not like he'd be at home with us, anyway.

I played with my straw, picked at my nails, sat in the heavy silence with my brother. He had scared me something awful, storming in like that. I thought someone had died. Part of me wanted to chew him out for it, for embarrassing me in front of Nancy Wheeler, who apparently knew of him and thought he was white trash. I could already tell she hated me, and now this incident would probably just make her hate me more. But I couldn't bring myself to do it; Keith just looked so miserable about it all.

"Why're you tellin' me all this?" I asked softly. "You never tell me this sorta thing."

"I don't know," Keith sighed. He sounded tired, more tired than any man his age should. "You were gonna find out eventually. Maybe I just…"

He trailed off, that blank expression back on his face. Maybe – what? "Keith…?"

"For fuck's sake, Sadie! Why does it matter? You're a person – I talk to you. Why you gotta attach meanin' to everything?" He snapped, and I recoiled from him. "You've known Steve your whole life, I thought you'd wanna know."

I squinted at him over my milkshake. "Well, he's not _my _friend, so I don't see why you think I'd care."

My big brother had taken harder hits, so he didn't rear back like I had. Over the years, I had seen him with black eyes, nose bloodied and broken, lips split, mottled with bruises, and with hastily-done stitches. But something in his eyes changed. A split-second flash of white-hot anger that I had never once seen directed at _me_. Keith could get annoyed, irritated, absolutely one-hundred percent fed up with me, but he never got angry with me. I had thought the way he snapped at me was anger, but I could see now that I was wrong: it was that look in his eyes that was gone as soon as it appeared. _That _was anger.

I instantly felt a pit forming in my stomach; my brother now saw me as nothing more than the guys he liked to beat up. "Keith, I'm sorry."

He shrugged. "Fine, it's fine," He said. "Just thought you should know. You prolly have homework or somethin', right? C'mon, let's get you home."

Keith stood up and stubbed out his cigarette in his Coke bottle, and I followed him back to the Impala, a little confused. I thought for sure he would be chewing him out for saying something like that, but this is what I was getting instead. I slid into the passenger seat, and he didn't even turn on the radio, which he _always _does. Everything in his body language screamed that he wanted to explode, and yet the entire car ride back to the house, we were silent. When he pulled up beside the house, I went to open the car door, and that's when he decided to start talking again.

"Sade-o, look, this kinda has us rocked, okay? I just needed to talk, and you deserved to know. Steve's family, kiddo."

I realized that this was an olive branch. Keith didn't really like staying angry for long. But the thing is, I wasn't done feeling angry yet. I was sorry for what I had said, but he hadn't cared. Not only that, he had embarrassed me in front of not only the entire art club, but Nancy Wheeler, too, who thought he was white trash. So I got out of the car, slammed the door behind me, and leaned in the window.

"Oh, yeah? _Steve's _your family? The Curtises are _your _brothers? If you need to talk about it so bad, why don't'cha go talk to your white trash friends, _Two-Bit?_"

"Excuse me?"

"Hey – that was Susie Wheeler who said that, not me. Don't kill the messenger." I kicked his tire. "That's for embarrassing me in front of Nancy Wheeler, jackass."

And then I stomped up the front walk, my brother shouting after me, but I ignored him, and a few moments later, I could hear the screech of his tires as he drove off.

XXXXX

**AN: A lot happening in this chapter. **

**I would love to hear from you all, and I thank you for your continued support of this story!**

**Stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks for reading!**


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